The Best Small-Business Sites in America

With apologies to Mark Twain, tales of the Internet's death have been greatly exaggerated. Presenting Inc's guide to what makes a great Web site.

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Web Awards: Best Practices

We went looking for a few outstanding Web sites. That's exactly what we found.

Earlier this year Inc invited entrepreneurs to enter the magazine's third annual Web Awards competition. Nearly 800 did so. The Inc editorial staff and a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts reviewed the entries, slowly narrowing the field to an elite constellation of 16 small-business Web stars. One of those sites -- a California adventure-travel site -- was named our all-around champion, earning Inc's prestigious General Excellence award.

So what distinguished the honorees from the also-rans? What lifted those few finishers out of the crowd and into the winners' circle?

For our best-in-show choice, it's a pretty simple formula: cool, useful features plus strong customer service equals big-time success online. Judges unanimously praised All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting, of Walnut Creek, Calif. ( www.aorafting.com), for creating a site with streamlined good looks and nifty mile-by-mile virtual river tours. But they were even more impressed with the company's online customer service. Web-site visitors can check trip availability, ask questions, make tentative reservations, price gear, get maps, check river and weather conditions, arrange accommodations, and even qualify for last-minute discounts. (See " A Web Strategy Runs Through It.")

"What's not to be wowed by?" asked judge Ron Zemke, president of Performance Research Associates Inc., in Minneapolis. "It loads quickly, it's clean, it's easy to understand. It has a wonderful balance of information, glitz, and service features." Not to mention the family-owned company's remarkable return on investment; in fact, the site is also Inc's second-place finisher in the ROI category.

Then there's Nova Cruz Products LLC ( www.xootr.com), a New Hampshire scooter manufacturer that earned Inc's honorable mention for General Excellence, as well as first place in Design and a third-place finish in Marketing. The Nova Cruz site looks terrific. More important, though, it gets the job done. As one judge put it: "They exhibit their products well and make it easy to find out what you want to know in a visually appealing way."

Overall, however, our judges insist there's still plenty of room for improvement. They visited many sites where, as Gertrude Stein once observed of Oakland, Calif., there was no there there. "Too many were devoid of content and did nothing but look good," said judge Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group, in Fremont, Calif. Put another way, many sites simply lacked value. Said Nielsen: "There has to be some reward to the user from visiting a site. Especially in business."

Even some of the best small-business sites could benefit from better online branding. One judge called the much-admired Nova Cruz site pretty but somewhat unfocused. "What is the name of this company?" asked a slightly exasperated Bill Demas, an executive vice-president at Vividence Corp., a consulting company in San Mateo, Calif. "Is it Xootr? Urban Transport? Or Nova Cruz?" (He's referring to the Web site's home page, which features all three names. For the record, Nova Cruz is the name of the company, Xootr is its product's name, and urban transport is its mission.)

And many site owners still haven't learned that Web users have no patience for pages that take forever to materialize. "It took over a minute for some product photos and descriptions to load," one judge observed in disgust. "Totally unacceptable in a world where customers get itchy fingers after eight seconds." Other sites use Flash technology to create intricate introductions with dancing graphics on their home pages. Increasingly, those same sites feature a button that users can click to skip the show -- raising the question of why the company bothered with Flash technology in the first place.

Many small-business sites seem to fall victim to the too-much-is-better theory: they cram every centimeter of every page with tiny, hard-to-read text and links. Or they indiscriminately clutter their sites with additional articles, tips, and other resources. In its Web Awards application, one entrant wrote the following about its content-stuffed site: "The first impression you get when you come to our site is that it is an exclusively information [sic] site." "That's a problem," pointed out judge Phil Terry, CEO of New York City-based Web-strategy company Creative Good Inc. However well intended, that tidal wave of supporting materials drowns out the retailer's real mission: selling products. "It took eight clicks to find a price list," Performance Research's Zemke observed of the same site. "That's something consumers hate."

Even the best small-company sites still struggle with technology. Nova Cruz, our General Excellence runner-up, was off-line for several days during judging owing to a router problem. "It was shocking to see that several sites were not up and running during the judging," tsk-tsked Marcia Yudkin, a Boston-based author of several Internet-marketing guides. One travel agency's site, rated highly by several judges, missed becoming a finalist because of its own technical horror story.

But for all those warts and wrinkles, this year's best sites prove that the Web still offers promise. "I see companies slowly becoming more sophisticated about using the Web as a place to do business in all its forms," said judge Ryan Bernard, president of Wordmark Associates Inc., in Houston. "The entrants ran the gamut of sophistication from those who still see the Web as only an E-commerce tool to those who see it as a way to build and manage business activities." Judge John Hartnett, CEO of BlueMissile, a Web-design company in Minneapolis, agreed. "What struck me was the diversity in budgets and approaches -- all of which seemed to add up to the same excellent results," he said.

Based on those results, we developed what amounts to a blueprint for small-business Web-site success. Call it the "Seven Best Practices of Highly Effective Web Sites." The winners have these characteristics:

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