Here are several excerpts from The 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing Professional Services Online:

Selling intangibles is hard work. Putting together a successful Web site that peddles intangibles is even harder.

Lawyers, architects, engineers, designers, ad agencies, physicians, and other professionals don't, however, seem fazed. That's particularly true of the legal world, where no self-respecting law firm would be caught dead nowadays without a Web site.

Here's a look at the top sins that many professional services sites—maybe most—commit:

1. Self-centeredness - This is the deadliest sin. Buyers come to sites for assurance, not ego trips. What buyers want is comfort. That means offering a site that shows "We know you, your business, and your industry—and we've solved the kind of problem you have.

2. Wordiness - There's way too much black on most professional sites, and way too little white. Long words in long sentences making up long paragraphs stuck in long bios, long service descriptions and the like. Gray. Dull. Boring. That's how most pages on professional sites look.

3. Jargon - Technical jargon doesn't provide comfort. For starters, it doesn't get read. Too hard. What it does—read or not—is send a message to those of us who aren't blessed with a medical degree or whatever: It says arrogance. "We matter. You don't."

4. Staleness - It takes a lot of dedicated resources to keep a site fresh—something the top firms and practices have begun to recognize. Web sites cannot be maintained out of a part-timer's back pocket.

5. Cliché images - What few images you do find on a lot of professional sites are typically worn out and predictable.

6. No images - I know. Lawyers are going to argue that they're not in a world that lends itself to being visual.

7. Rigidity - Too few sites knit their pages together. The best ones let the user graze on information, a bite here and a bite there.

Let's be fair. Web sites for professional services have a limited purpose. They principally help architects and lawyers and such get found. Not get picked.

But even if they exist mostly to soften the sale, shouldn't professional service sites do that well? A good site might or might not win work. But a bad one might lose an opportunity. Or, at best make it harder to cash in.

And, who needs harder?