Prospects and customers often ask similar questions. Your Q&A page not only gives people answers they may be looking for, but it lets them know they aren't alone. Others have same needs and questions they do.

3. Schedule online events. These can be online chats or streaming audio broadcasts. There are a number of services that provide free chat rooms. Live365.com will let you do free audio streaming.

The event can be a guest expert answering questions, an interview with a popular author, or even a meeting of your distributors or franchisees. Be sure to announce your online event well ahead of time. Give it plenty of promotion. Mention it often in your newsletter, on your site, even in your advertising.

4. Start an email discussion. Email is by far most popular feature of Internet. Some experts believe big increase in people using Net has been caused by massive number of people who use email several times each day.

You can harness power of email to build your online community. An email discussion is simply a system that shares email messages between everyone in group. Messages can flow freely or be edited, approved, or rejected by a moderator in your organization.

It only takes a few minutes to get your email discussion going. Yahoo Groups and Topica.com provide excellent and reliable free service.

5. This final idea is extremely simple, but very powerful. Post good comments from customers. Customers often aren't sure what kind of results to expect from your product or service. Expectations of "good results" can vary widely.

By posting customer success stories, you can help other customers understand what to expect and what is possible. This goes a long way toward building customer confidence and better understanding of your product or service.

Online community is becoming more and more important as Web matures. People increasingly get online to check with a few communities they belong to. Make sure you have a community available for your customers and prospects.

I consider this to be a perfect example of ecommerce.

As web designers, we need to recognize that many ecommerce systems can be interfaced as needed to other tech, and that ecommerce as narrowly defined will only ever apply, with maximum saturation, to a segment of market.

The high tech companies contribute to these bad metrics. Both in sales and in hiring, companies talk in terms of ASP, CGI, VBScript. To average business person, these terms are not helpful. Quite opposite. They create a "cognitive barrier". Jargon is useful within a specialized group, but actually impairs communication between groups.

By talking jargon to non-technical people, we actually make what we as web designers and IT architects do, harder for them to understand.

We can use a narrow definition of ecommerce, and we therefore have a situation in which ecommerce modules can typically be rented for $50 a month and plugged into existing websites.

Or we can take a wider definition, one which includes customer service, product support, complaints and returns-handling, and, of course, online sales as indicated. This is not a $50 solution, not something that can be cooked up in a day or a week.

Instead, design of an effective ecommerce solution requires care, expertise, and experience of client. The flow and arhitecture of site, content and emphasis, must be designed with

The industry as a whole is best served if we try to be less technically and more "user" oriented. That is, to talk not in terms of CGI, Java or JavaScript or ASP, but rather in terms of catalogues, shopping baskets, and currency converters. If we submerge technology and instead focus on functionality, then indeed terms such as ecommerce become far more meaningful.

But more than this, each website can then be geared to individual needs, without expectation that a "good" website must have ecommerce, or streaming video, or feature A, or B, or C.