The Ins and Outs of Creating and Maintaining
Great, Effective Websites
Basics of: A Complete Web Strategy
There are several pieces of the puzzle when it comes to an online strategy for improving brand advocacy. Whether it’s a social cause, retail, or a media platform, this (basic) approach can be applied effectively. Granted, the personnel involved have to have a superior understanding of each element of the strategy (brand psychology, design, SEO, SEM, social media, and communications).
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. - Anonymous
8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses
While this article goes beyond online marketing, I still had to share it as I think it’s a great look at how to make small companies succeed. Applying many of these strategies not only to your people and management approach but also to your online strategy makes a huge difference in your potential to grow and thrive.
Need to Create a Sitemap for a Legacy Site?
If you, like me, often end up having to work with legacy sites which haven’t been maintained super well (or in any trackable way, or both), you may find yourself in need of a way to easily extract a full site map with all the site URLs.
Particularly if you need to arrange redirects to a new site in the works (301 redirects, of course!). Or even if you just need a base starting point for working on SEO or copy/content/usability improvements.
After doing quite a bit of searching, this $20 tool was the best I found at doing this very thing. In 6 minutes it extracted 728 URLs I was able to easily place in an Excel document and start hacking away at the appropriate new URLs they should redirect to at launch. I don’t even want to think about the hours that would have taken without this tool. Enjoy!
Why Jakob Nielsen is Wrong About Mobile Websites
Jakob Nielsen has a lot of great things to say about usability, but when it come to mobile web I have to agree he’s in the wrong. The Boston Globe just won huge awards (and for good reason) by launching a responsive design that took online newspapers to a new level.
Not only is creating separate sites worse for users (if you redirect me automatically to another site that doesn’t have what I need I will not be pleased!), it’s also worse for maintenance internally. Websites can become behemoth monsters full of content (which is not a bad thing as long as you’re organized about it)- why would you create a 2-headed beast to maintain if you don’t have to?
Putting mobile first doesn’t mean desktops don’t play into the hierarchy of needs. Be efficient with a responsive design and you meet everyone’s needs in one, nice pretty package.
Watch this great video, an interview with Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google. Great insights on looking at data effectively by focusing on outcomes, not on whole numbers. As well as ensuring you have a democracy when it comes to online ideas- try ideas and see what sticks!
Enjoy.
Google's Results Get More Personal with "Search Plus Your World"
What you Need to Know About YouTube's New Analytics Program
These new features are a great add to YouTube’s Analytics, particularly seeing where viewers stop watching videos and how often it is shared.
Always Think Like a User: The Importance of Consistency
While reworking some landing pages at work today, I discovered that a specific training offered at our company was referred to 3 different ways online. In an email, it was referred to as XX Training. But if you clicked through to the link in the email, the website referred to it as ZZ Training. And if you made it to a Tech Support Website, it was the XZ Training.
As a user, how do you know you’ve actually arrived at the right place if it’s always called something else? You aren’t internal, and you don’t know the alternate names. It’s confusing, and can often lead to abandonment from your site or call to action (in this case, actually participating in a training!).
When you’re composing anything online, be sure you keep the user in mind. Stay away from inside baseball terminology that isn’t immediately intuitive to someone browsing your site. Whatever term you settle on, be sure you stick with it and update it everywhere it’s mentioned on your site (site search can help you out with that!). Consistency goes a long way when it comes to user experience.
