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?
