Talk To A Search Engine Marketing Firm Before A Web Designer – 5 Reasons

When the average person goes to buy a brand new car, they usually don’t stop by the tire shop first. There’s not much sense in buying tires for a car you don’t have, and besides, don’t most new cars come with tires?

Yet for some inexplicable reason, people often work with a search engine marketing firm after they’ve been to the tire shop web designer. A great web design is like a great set of tires – it’s fantastic, but without an engine to make the wheels turn, tires are just decoration.

Search engine marketing firms like Spork are often the engine that drives a website. Before you buy your next new car website, here are 5 reasons to start the web design process by speaking with a search engine marketing firm first: Read More

Multiple Websites and Making Fajitas – Internet Marketing Mistakes

It’s very smart to “silo” your Internet marketing efforts, at least from the perspective of planning, budgeting, and tracking. However, when it comes to creating multiple company web sites, “silos” are usually a bad strategy.

Because I enjoy it so much, let’s relate this concept to cooking. Read More

Great Article About Pretty Web Designs

I just read a fantastic article about “Why You Don’t Want Michelangelo Working On Your Website.” While the title pretty much explains what the article is about, I liked a couple of specific points they made. First, here’s a great analogy:

Your [website] visitor is waiting for dinner.

Imagine going to a restaurant hungry and ready to eat. Now imagine that before you can even order your meal, the wait staff delivers a 10 minute presentation about the restaurant, the staff, etc. Sure, it would be nice to know these things, but who wants to wait when it’s time to eat?

Here are the other key points I liked:

• Most websites can and should be structurally similar. Just like people, most websites can and should be structurally similar. That doesn’t mean the same colors should be used, the exact same layouts, etc. It simply means that navigation should be on the top of the page and on either side, that the search function should be top-right, that links to your ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ pages should always be found in the footer, etc.
• Animations and fancy graphic layouts can be distracting. It’s patently obvious, but there are a lot of web designers that just don’t get this simple point.

If you think of a website as a tool, and if you design your website to provide a certain function (say, lead generation), you will be successful. Check out our Principals of Business Website Design for more design suggestions.