A Ten-Point Guide....

A Ten-Point Guide to Putting Your Clients On The Web: Here are a few bite-sized chunks of advice to bear in mind if you’re presented with the kind of situation that kicked off this article:
1. The Web is just another medium for you to work in - the only difference is that its potential for marketing “interactivity” gives you a wider palette to paint with - it’s like moving from crayons to an airbrush.	6. A consumer with a modem is still a consumer. The only difference is that they have enough money to buy a modem, PC, Internet account etc. Nevertheless, they still buy tennis balls, tea-bags and tissues. A product doesn’t have to be a “big ticket” item to benefit from web advertising.
2. Do what you do best and leave the technicalities to those who care to wade through the intricacies of Hypertext Mark-up Language. Your client is paying you to sell product - not learn the significance of the “<TR>” command in HTML 3.0.	7. Don’t hand over the cheque until you’ve viewed the site via the Internet on a PC/modem combination that’s at least as crummy as the ones your potential customers will be using.
3. When you employ consultants to create your pages for you, ask them how much conventional advertising experience they have. If the answer is “none”, run for your life.	8. Your client’s web-site has to be maintained, keeping the files up to date and free of corruption. If it isn’t in the original budget, someone’s going to lose money in the long run. Make sure it isn’t you by explaining to your client that creating the site isn’t a one-off expense. This goes triple for sites that have an E-mail response mechanism.
4. If the same consultants also can’t quote any advertising design experience, forget about running, what you need is a rocket-powered skateboard....	9. The bigger the graphics files in your pages, the longer they take to download and the more likely your customers will hit the stop button and go somewhere else. That two-megabyte Photoshop masterpiece doesn’t look so classy when you realise no-one will wait around the half-hour it might take before they get to see it.
5. If you have a mechanism that allows customers to inquire via E-mail, be ready to do something with the result - and pronto. Not only does it cement an impression of efficiency and caring about their custom, you’ll have to produce a mail-pack to sent in response. See what I mean about expanding the budget instead of shrinking it?	10. All the old rules of thumb still apply when creating advertising for the web. Just because these people are “wired”, it doesn’t mean they’re weird. Typography that would be unreadable on paper is just as unreadable on a monitor - perhaps even more so. If you centre all the type and use wide leading, people still have to go cross-eyed to read it, so the chances are, they wont bother. Neither should you.