Inbound Marketing Blog

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:

Is it crisp?

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?

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.

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: