This month’s HOW magazine (October self-promotion issue) includes an article by Lisa Hazen called, “Rock Your Website.” Lisa interviewed me for the article and quotes me generously throughout (thanks Lisa!). The article also includes a side-bar I wrote called “8 Steps to Make Your Site Sing.”
I’m heartened to see that Lisa reported a consistent theme from all the various experts she cited–that content is the main point on the web and that design should serve the content, not overshadow it. For example, she quoted Megan Slabinski, executive director of staffing agency The Creative Group. Megan hits the theme with her advice about adding content to portfolio items, “describe your role in the piece…explain what the design or business challenge was…quantify results.”
Lee Lefever creates these wonderful videos that take what can be complicated tools and concepts, turning them into easy to understand primers. His first (or least first massively popular) video was RSS in Plain English. So this video on Google Reader is a great companion.
I recommend Google Reader to my clients as the best and easiest way to begin engaging in an “outward facing” web strategy. Google Reader is an effective tool to manage the first step, listening to others. It’s ability to easily extend this effort by sharing with others is another key benefit. The next step is to begin participating by commenting on some of the posts you read. I’ve started using Google Reader’s tag folders to sort my feeds into a few groups. My first group includes those bloggers I find most compelling and that I intend to read more thoroughly and potentially comment on more frequently. I can then scan the rest of my feeds a bit more quickly, sifting for a few nuggets here and there.
This video is an excellent overview of Google Reader. Chris Butler also wrote a great Web Smart newsletter on RSS and Google Reader with valuable tips. Take a look, and if you aren’t using RSS go ahead and grab a free account and get started. (I also embedded the original RSS video below.)
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It’s 2008 and sadly I still need to write about splash pages–an unfortunate stronghold of advertising agency websites. The use of the “splash page” has a long history (long in Internet years anyway). Back in 1999 I wrote an article for Web Techniques about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of website splash pages. Today that article is moot. There are no appropriate uses for a splash page. (more…)
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This week I consulted on web strategy with Forma Design in Raleigh. We worked through all of the concepts that ultimately lead to the conclusion that an effective web strategy depends on a robust content strategy. Most agencies, when they get to this point, begin to feel the weight of regularly creating compelling content for their website. Where will they possibly find the time to do that?
That’s why agency positioning is so crucially important. The only why to consume and create compelling content regularly is have a clear focus. Without focus sustaining a content strategy is indeed impossible. An advertising agency’s content strategy must flow from focused positioning or else blog posts and articles will devolve into commonplace topics that get harder and harder to produce, and less compelling along the way.
Unfortunately, most agencies embrace positioning about a much as a trip to the dentist–sans pain killer. They fear boredom, or the potential loss of opportunities. Fortunately, this is not the case with Forma. They’ve adopted a position as experts in Life Science Marketing. Their work, their experience, their client base, (and soon their content strategy) all back this up.
While digesting all that goes into web strategy, the technology, the concepts, the tools, and the time, it is easy for an agency to feel overwhelmed, and even lose heart. But positioning is a great encourager. It makes web strategy–while certainly hard–definitely possible.
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Thanks @itafroma (That’s Mark Trapp for you non-twitter folks) for tagging the Bear Brook site in del.icio.us with my accrit tag.
Positioning: Bear Brook Design’s positioning, clearly declared on the home page, is “experts in entertainment and media marketing.” This expertise is demonstrated front and center with a rotating series of entertainment-oriented work samples. The portfolio further proves their expertise with clients consisting of radio, television, media and arts organizations. Their range of services is refreshingly kept to four: Branding, Environment, Print, and Web/Interactive. True, these categories do cover a lot of ground. But at least they don’t go out of their way to list every possible area of service as though they were afraid to leave any opportunity uncovered.
One of the real strength of Bear Brooks positioning is under utilized. They have an entirely separate website that describes their unique “Brandopoly” solution. This looks like a highly refined offering. It certainly differentiates them and demonstrates expertise. I would make more of this on the website. They do link to it off the homepage, and it is listed under “Services,” but such a powerful tool should have more of a site wide presence, perhaps even it’s own navigation tab.
Content: The site’s content is good, but could be pushed further. I’m happy to see some commentary on all the portfolio detail pages, and the news section is updated regularly. They also have a resources section with a handful of thoughtful articles. I would add article dates, in order to establish an expectation for update frequency. With such a focused position though, establishing a more robust content strategy, perhaps integrating a blog, should be quite attainable.
Platform: Bear Brook is running Drupal as a CMS so I’m sure they’ll have no problems making site updates. The page coding is clean and should give search engines no trouble. The URL structure gets a little long (too many slashes) as you dig down into the content (ex. http://bearbrook.com/about/news/2008/bear-brook-brands-bethel-woods). Since the most robust content pages end up with the longest URL they’ll take a small hit in search results. This is minor issue but could be improved (Note: whenever changing URL structures remember to use 301 redirects for the current page URLs). I love it that they use unique title tags for each page! But they could be more strategic in the choice of phrases.
Design: The visual design is very clean, intuitive and easy to use. It’s sign of web maturity when a design agency shows restraint on the overall visual design in order to promote the work, the thinking and the content. While the website won’t show up in Communication Arts Interactive annual (and I don’t think agency sites should be aiming for this) it is a refreshingly clean site, with an attractive design and no significant interface problems.
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When I review an agency site for “The Crit” I look for examples that perform well on at least one or two of the four criteria I consider most important for a successful agency website: positioning, content, platform, and design.
I’m making an exception for this post. This agency website fails on all counts. My intention is not to poke fun at this agency. In fact, I’ve gone to great lengths to obscure their identity. (more…)
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Last May I addressed the topic of search engine marketing at the Highland Capital Partners Internet Marketing Summit. The May 2008 Web Smart newsletter “Search Engine Marketing: At the Corner of Context and Intent,” provides the substance of my talk. I highlighted three main principles for evaluating any online advertising opportunity; context, recommendation and intent.
I recently tagged an article on the Social Times called “How Long Can “Ad Supported” Last?” Nick O’Neill echoed my main point when he wrote, “Search is still the only thing that can measure intention [italics mine] and nobody has figured out a better way to reach people.” There is a lot of excitement about social media, and the explosion of web based applications, media, and services. Most all of these sites are advertising driven, yet the effectiveness of the ads in such contexts is not as great as advertisers would like.
It’s incredibly important for advertisers to be learning about and participating in the social media movement. But not so much to figure out where to best place their ads. Rather they need to be in tune with how it’s changing the nature of marketing and advertising all together–the effects of which we are just now beginning to feel. But this is not a post on social media’s impact on advertising, it’s a reference to my search engine marketing session and newsletter.
While search engine marketing (both optimization and advertising) is not the newest most exciting subject, it is still by far the most effective avenue for driving traffic. That’s because it meets us at the corner of context and intent. It’s in the act of searching, using various iterations of search phrases, that a search engine delivers it’s results. And it’s when we are searching as part of a purchasing process, contextual ads have their greatest effect. They not only reach us with the right message, but more importantly, at the right time.
So while social media is very important to brands and marketers, search is still the bread and butter of active, traffic-driving Internet advertising. Check out the newsletter to read more.
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