Inbound Marketing Blog

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.

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.

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.

Marketing has always had concepts that remain relevant throughout the years, but it's also constantly changing as technology advances and buyer shopping habits and methods change. As trends, the economy, consumer preferences, and other factors change, marketers have to consistently take a proactive approach if they want to see conversions. 

Keywords have traditionally been the focus of Google and other search engines since the mid-nineties. So after twenty-plus years of focusing search engine optimization efforts around a short list of keywords to work on and rank for, times have changed. With updated Google algorithms, the focus is no longer just on keywords, although those are still relevant. The greater focus is on topics that answer the questions that users are searching for via  desktop computers, mobile devices, and voice command devices. Let's delve into what this change means for you.

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?

The year is almost over and, even though a handful of companies started planning their new marketing strategies during Q2 or Q3, it's better late than never! Here are five marketing questions for your company to review before the new year:

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.

Imagine this scenario: You have spent three to four months planning your new website or redesign, hired the best website development and marketing team around. You and your team have spent countless hours designing the layout with all of the best-practices in mind. Workflows have been carefully thought out and implemented. In short, you have designed your website to effortlessly guide your users through the buyer's journey and convert them into customers and delight them into becoming raving fans.

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.