Perhaps the most undervalued page of your Web site is the “Contact Us” page.

Here’s a story from my friend, Jon Websurfer. Jon was assigned the task of finding a supplier to make customized edible treats to use as corporate gifts for his company. He typed some keywords into his search engine, including his location. Out of thousands of bakeries in the U.S., a lucky eight showed up on the first page of  results (the rest of the results weren’t bakers). Jon clicked on the results for five or six of these and looked over their websites, taking a maximum of two minutes on each page (for some it was more like 10 seconds). He evaluated them for:

• Presentation (if the site looks good, chances are they’ll do good product presentation)
• Ease of navigation (if he’s frustrated with your site, he may be frustrated with your service as well)
• Best looking (and best variety of) product photos
• How well they explained their ordering procedure, packaging, delivery and lead time.

Hoping to patronize a local supplier, he was frustrated at how hard it was to find out their locations. (more…)