Inbound Marketing Blog

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?

Mobile commerce is an important aspect of sales, and consumers utilize it constantly (peep the rise of Amazon and other big online retailers).

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 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.

Tribute Media has been working closely with Architecture and Engineering firms on their web presence for the past 11 years, and during this time, we’ve found many similarities in these industries when it comes to online marketing.

Architects and Engineers are technically savvy people, and because of that, some of them have a working knowledge of how to create and maintain a website, or at the very least, want to have the ability to manage the site themselves to make consistent updates to projects and portfolios. On the other hand, for as many firms that are actively maintaining and updating their own sites, there are many, MANY more that have completely let their websites fall to the wayside because they are busy focusing on the activities they are best at and that will directly impact the bottomline: architecture and engineering projects.

“There is never a lack of subject matter; just absence of creativity.” – Lee Hammond, ArtistsNetwork.com

Maybe you’ve never heard the term Artist’s Block, but I bet you get what it means. Yes, just like writers get writer’s block, artists experience that same creative traffic jam. Ideally, we creatives would have all the time in the world to spring into action only when inspiration hits us, but deadlines are real, and they don’t consider your level of inspiration or lack thereof.

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.

This may not sound encouraging, but research shows us that the average online user will stay on a website for less than one minute. So you obviously have to make a strong impression with visitors to keep them coming back for more. Since you only have less than a minute to do this, it’s best to learn web usability principles to improve your chances for success.

In 2015, when we started planning our first  Web Marketing Checkup Clinic, I wrote the original version of this blog post. Now that we've hosted a few of these checkup clinics, as well as conducted countless one-on-one checkups for clients and non-clients alike, I thought I would revisit how it all began and why this exercise is so important to us.

Hopefully, you've had the opportunity to have a web marketing checkup or have joined us for another workshop or event, here at the Tribute Media office. If you have, you know two things:

1) They are always fun and educational

2) Corey cooks some mean BBQ

But other than food and fun, why do we do it? Why do we lend our time and expertise to businesses... FOR FREE?

In short: Because we love building businesses.

No More inline CSS

Designing for email has always been a bit of a pain for designers and developers. It requires a departure from the way they develop websites or apps. But there is some good news for those who have to consider email in our designs:

I had a neighbor ask to pick my brain about what it takes to move into the web design and development field. She is starting her degree program and still has a couple of years but is wise to start working toward her career now. I was originally just going to respond to her directly but I figured I’d write a blog post because I think it might be helpful to others, too.

One thing to note: the answers I give here are based on how we do things at Tribute Media but we are a little unique… mostly in how we work with our employees. Our office is closed on Fridays and we encourage our employees to work remotely every Friday. Most agencies/companies will expect their employees to work on site but allow contractors to work wherever. There is something positive creatively about working on-site with your team that you can’t get remotely.

Oh, and a little, not-so-humble brag here.