Most businesses now have a web presence, yet many of them treat it like a billboard, not like an actual operating part of their organization. Marketing managers need to ensure their company's website looks and works like it's a proper business channel, and they devote the effort required to make it appealing.

Here are five basic rules for ensuring clients or customers aren't worried they'll be ripped off when dealing with your company through your website.

Make sure your web audience knows who you are. That means full corporate contact information – a physical or mailing address, phone and fax numbers and e-mail addresses for major departments or staff. (There are now ways of defeating programs that crawl websites collecting e-mail addresses for spammers, such as Spam Vaccine. )

Provide business-like policies and make them easy to see. That includes an anti-spam policy, secure credit-card processing policies (including information on what happens with backorders), a customer-privacy statement, and full terms and conditions of doing business with you. These can all simply be links to separate pages – they don't need to clutter up your main pages, but they should be there if needed.

Get your own domain. The cost of your own domain is so inexpensive, there's no reason whatsoever to be using some free site's links. It's the equivalent of being in a mall, and having the mall's receptionist answer your phone. It alone will help communicate that you're an actual business.

Show a solid design. Ensure the site is professional-looking, visually appealing and contains the info that you know is necessary for customers or clients to find everything they need to make a buying decision. But that's just common sense: Image is everything – well, close to it, that's for sure. And if you have on-line ordering and/or payment, make sure you have friendly customers or clients do tests of it for you before it goes live, so you'll know if there's anything getting in their way of completing the deal.

Keep the site up to date. This may sound obvious, but it's not to quite a few businesses. Broken links, pages under construction, missing pictures, old pricing schedules, employees long gone, typos.... Web site maintenance is as important as sweeping the showroom floor or doing renovations at night or on weekends instead of during the business day.

Article courtesy of Microzip Data Services.