One of the most common questions we hear as a web marketing agency is, "What is a CMS?" This is usually after one of us annoyingly drops this jargony acronym in a conversation with a new client or prospect. To which we sheepishly reply, "Oh, sorry! It stands for Content Management System." Which is often followed by: "What is a content management system?"
Just having a website on the internet is no longer enough to be found online. All industries are experiencing that reality and are recognizing the need to have more of an active approach to their online presence. Healthcare companies are no exception!
Sure your website may have a lot of traffic coming from patients attempting to access their online portal or to find their provider's contact information, but that's not the kind of traffic that brings in new business. Providing a good user experience and online presence that works for current patients is a basic necessity. But good user experience and online presence that also captures the interest and business of potential patients can be revolutionary!
If you build a website and never put it on the internet, is it really a website?
This is not a deep philosophical question. It has a simple answer.
NO.
A development site is like an unsent email in your draft folder or all those baby pictures of your teenager on your phone that you keep meaning to back up to your computer or maybe even print and hang on the wall.
So then why are there so many websites living in the purgatory of a development environment instead of on the world wide web?
This is not a rhetorical question. It also has a simple, though not as brief, answer.
Web marketing services are more essential than ever for businesses right now. With the markets crashing and businesses closing their physical doors left and right, having an online presence is the only thing that will keep businesses generating revenue. Before the Coronavirus pandemic made its entrance, roughly 80% of business focus was on brick-and-mortar efforts and (if a company was mindful of this digital age) roughly 20% of their business efforts were spent on digital advertising and web marketing. So, what happens now that brick-and-mortar businesses have to close their doors? How do they keep employees employed and continue to see cash flow?
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.
See what I did there? The 5 C's of selecting photos for your site... now that they're all C's, you'll all remember them better!
I can't stress enough the importance of beginning with good content. From a design perspective, so much of the impression your online presence leaves on users depends on the imagery you select and how you use it. More often than not, clients come to us with little to no imagery for their web project. Even when they do, the odds of it being good imagery are pretty slim. Needless to say, I spend a lot of my time scouring stock photography sites searching for fantastic imagery to bring all the elements of a web masterpiece together.
Whether you're searching for imagery as a client or on behalf of a client, here are a few items to keep in mind:
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.
Did you know the human attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s?
Goldfish = 9 seconds
Humans= 6-8 seconds
Your website has a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.
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?
