Last week, I may have served up a little bait-and-switch with the first installment of this series. Some of you may have come looking for information on when to break email best practices and, instead, got a heaping handful of how we're changing our newsletter. That's all well and good, but how does that help you? This week, I'm making good on the title.
Suscribers to our awe-inspiring, world-renowned email newsletter may have noticed that I've been making some changes lately. Indeed, I've been tinkering with and testing this tool since assuming control and production, though I'd venture to say most of the changes have been subtle. The most-recent alteration, however, was somewhat significant.
I've been working on a quantitative content audit of the Digett site for a little while now, and I recently reached that golden spot in the sun where I realized I had cataloged all our blog content (until Valarie's latest post, that is). Something immediately hit me: We really haven't published all that much. That's not good.
Over the last five years, we've posted 240 entries to the Digett blog—that breaks down to 48 per year or four per month. Those aren't necessarily impressive numbers for a digital marketing firm that urges its clients to focus on fresh content; we can't let our business get in the way of our business.
I'm a bit of a book addict, to my wife's chagrin; like wire hangers in an empty closet, books tend to multiply in my home. Moreover, I almost never get rid of any of them, and my ad-hoc organization schemes have failed to bring any semblance of order to my little library.
Online content tends to suffer from the same morass of proliferation and fragmentation, and the situation is only getting worse. Ten years ago, your business had a static website and a stray directory profile; today, it's a dynamic, CMS-based site with multiple blogs, a YouTube channel, Twitter account, Facebook page, and [insert online-flavor-of-the-month] presence.
While no two websites are exactly alike, the process of creating those unique websites is actually fairly routine. Every website Digett delivers goes through a a series of phases to ensure consistency and quality of the end product.
Not every step is appropriate for every project or client. We frequently abbreviate certain steps, since not every item is appropriate for every case. At the onset of a project, we'll do our best to determine what's needed and will define a project timeline to adhere to throughout the site-creation process. Assuming time and budget allows, though, a typical full-fledged project goes through each of the following steps: Discovery, Design, Production, Training.
In this industry, we hear a lot of snarky talk about traditional media and how practitioners "just don't get it." From my vantage point, the same could be said for engagement practitioners; if anything, their condescension comes with a great deal of irony.
Still, there are good points to be made about the viability of pouring resources into traditional, "interruption" marketing techniques, particularly as consumers tune out and the still-rough economy promotes the online shift. But where to start?
Website projects can be overwhelming for the uninitiated, but they don't have to be.
When engaging a development firm, the two parties are agreeing to work together to create a finished web product in a certain amount of time for a certain budget. There's a lot of interdependency to deliver all those things as expected, and it can be easy for things to go wrong.
Not all site designs are easy; some, you have to work for. And by some, I mean all of them.
Recently, I had to work out a problem with a site showcasing logos on a black background. The problem was the logo files I had were JPEGs of each on a white background. Laying out these white rectangle logos on the black background just wasn't working for me—not a good look. So I came up with a Photoshop method to cut the logos away from their white backgrounds, thus making them usable on any color background. I assure you this method works better and more often than other traditional isolation techniques, magic wand included.
As I write, the clock has yet to chime midnight on December 31; however, all indications are that 2009 was the Year of Facebook, for both personal and business communication. The five-year-old social network has become a behemoth of users and capital, and marketers like myself have been forced to spend hours wading through silly farm games and virtual Yankee Candle giveaways to better understand how the service may be used by our clients.
I used to think "inspiration" was for people with no "imagination." I thought people who were inspired all the time were just too cool for school; you know the type—talking on a bluetooth headset while jogging to Jamba Juice at 5 a.m. So, I would say, let them have their inspiration, and I'll stick to going it alone, just me and my imagination.
