Giving it Away for Free

As a general rule, feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. These ladies, however, know what they’re talking about. Your company Web site is just another vehicle by which to promote your products.

Make yourselves look good.

Understand the power of the high-resolution image as selling tool.

Allow your visitors to download, upload, calculate ROI and browse with ease.

In this day and age, it’s just not possible to get by with some of the sorry-looking sites I’ve seen out there. A customer can leave and find another place to do business in a nanosecond. Don’t let your site become a commodity … provide the tools to make it a necessity. Even if you’re already doing well, by using the technology to its fullest advantage, you’ll only increase traffic.

Finally, free shoutouts. This list is in no way indicative of all the companies in the promotional products sector that are doing great; just a few I’ve come across in the last week that I thought were especially navigable:

• Logomark and Norwood: I would be remiss in not mentioning these biggies, but since we all know and love ‘em, let’s say “Kudos” and move on to three who seem to making the best of their budgets.

• Vantage Apparel: Their Web site has to be one of the most editor-friendly sites in the industry. Once you register, images are easy-to-download, and are the ever-covetable 300 dpi resolution that we need to publish.

• Tagmaster: Not the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen, but simple enough to follow, and the ROI calculator is a tool worth staying for.

• Article.1: Very nice. Just really well-done. It definitely needs marketing tools to make it a must-visit for distributors, but the general design rocks.