Blogs

"If you build it, they will come" was a beautiful hook to a sentimental movie, but it’s a terrible approach to online marketing.

Yes, most businesses need a website that knows who its target audience is and provides useful content to that audience in clear language, easily navigated structure and attractive design. But you can have all that and still completely fail to get site visitors, readers and customers, because a lot of what makes your site successful happens outside your website itself.

Why are there so many bad restaurant websites?

I recently had to plan a lunch meeting with a client in a part of the city I don’t normally go to, so I had a chance to try to find and then look at a number of restaurant websites. I was traveling at the time, so this searching was being done with my iPhone.

Several sites had a Flash frontpage with no bypass—meaning I couldn’t find out anything at all about them. Others didn’t give hours or days of operation, so I couldn’t tell if they were open for lunch. Few had easy-to-review menus—or menus at all.

Let me rephrase that: You don’t necessarily need a website. However, if you want your business to survive this depression, recession or economic downturn, you i need to be marketing yourself online.

I would love to tell every business owner I talk to that he needs a database-driven, content-management-based website, and that he should pay me five figures to build it. But it just isn’t so.

And I remember telling a number of business owners just a few years ago that they didn’t need to be on the web. And it was true then.

Tomorrow and Friday I’m heading to CMS Expo to brush up my Drupal and general content management system skills.

I have years of experience writing web sites from scratch, and working with a team of developers on custom designed systems, but the content management system approach seems like the wave of the future for all but the smallest sites. It takes a little more thought and a little more work up front to configure it, to figure out which features to turn on, how to lay out a flexible structure for content that doesn’t yet exist and over which you have no control.

At a recent eCommerce presentation, the speaker discussed various social networking tools that larger businesses and online-only businesses are using to increase web presence and boost search engine rankings. One that stood out for me as something that could be a boon to many smaller storefront businesses with a small website that are looking to improve their web presence but don’t have money right now to hire a developer is to start a Flickr Gallery for the business.