Inbound Marketing Blog

We'll give it to you straight- the success of a website development strategy meeting depends mostly on YOU. How you respond to and work alongside both internal and external teams will greatly affect the tone, efficiency, productivity, and overall results that come from the meeting. However, there are some other aspects to take into account as well, which we'll cover in this blog.

Choosing the right web developer for your web project can be a daunting process.  I am confident that often time the reason why companies tolerate a sub-par website is because they simply don’t know where to go to get the right developer.

I know, I know. That title makes it seem like I'm telling you that the only marketing agency you should hire are those where your budget will explode. But, that's not the case at all.

When shopping for web services (web design, web development, digital marketing, search engine optimization -- you get the idea), you might find it nearly impossible to compare providers. You'll have one provider that will build a website at $700, another at $7,000, and yet another at $17,000. You'll have an SEO provider suggest that they can get you all the business in the world for $100 per month but someone else might say that $1,000 is the minimum.

Over the years, I have thought a lot about the right way to offer web services to our clients. How should we make sure that we charge the right amount for the services that we offer?

For as long as business owners have had a location to hang their sign, they have tried to find more and more ways to get more and more people to buy from them.

What usually happens is that businesses (even experienced marketers) will simply create a punchlist of tactics that they think are important to do — if they do they’ll get sales.

After building and marketing websites for over ten years and working in technology, marketing, and visual design for many years before that, you can imagine that I've seen my share of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Perhaps my mental frame is skewed a bit because of what I know, but I see consistent problems with websites.

What's interesting is how many websites are close to being great but miss by a few key elements. I see this problem across websites both large and small. It doesn’t seem to matter how much companies spend. This issue is present on websites that are less than $1,000 and websites that are more than $100,000.

Take a look at your website and see how you stack up against the following issues. Note that these issues are in no particular order. So, don't place more weight on one because of where it sits on the list.

As you think about web marketing, there are some key considerations for your online presence. 

Here are the top 10 things that I think you should make sure that your website design and marketing strategy includes. If your web developer can't provide all of these things... make sure that you find one who can. 

DNS stands for the Domain Name System. The DNS records tell the internet where to send your internet traffic. The most common are address (A) records, CNAME records, name server (NS) records, and mail exchange (MX) records. This article will take a look at each of these. 

Many web developers simply tell their clients to point the Name Server Record to the new host and you let the web developer manage that for you.

So, what does this mean for you? How do you know what you should do to maintain functionality of your site and your email? Bear in mind that my descriptions below are what I tell my my clients, but I think everyone should understand these details.

Making the decision to outsource your business’s marketing efforts can be very difficult. Handing off the reins to an outside company can be scary, especially for small businesses that don’t have the resources to put a ton of money into their marketing efforts. We can’t all afford to run campaigns like Coca-Cola, Sony or Starbucks. However, there are many things to be learned from these big brands.

I've noticed an interesting trend in Facebook... more so in the last few months, but I think it's been growing for a number of years. Facebook (and most other social media platforms) has always been intended to bring like-minded people together; to bring friends together. It's been intended to allow people to continue to build relationships when they aren't in the same physical location.

Sometimes it feels as though the purpose of social media has become a place to tell everyone else they are wrong. It seems it's become a place that does a very good job of sowing the seeds of discontent. Because of this trend, I think it completely changes how we market.

Years ago, I was at a conference in Orlando, Florida and happened to stay across the street from Downtown Disney. I spent each of my nights there walking around, riding the water taxi, eating dinner and just relaxing. Usually when I travel for work, it’s all about work. Rarely do I find the time to enjoy my surroundings, so this was new for me.

I started thinking a bit about what Disney knows how to do right, and that is to provide the customer an experience that they won't forget. As I sat there one evening eating dinner I realized that my reality seemed suspended for a short while.

Think about Las Vegas. Every so often, a casino will be torn down so that there can be room made for a new one. The casinos get bigger and better. Moreover, they are all designed to give the visitors an experience that is otherworldly. It’s a design that is meant to suspend reality.

Now, I can understand that people want different experiences, but which experience do you think fosters a sense of excitement for your customers? Which experience do you think causes people to tell their friends? Which experience is worth more to the consumer?