Top ten business card design problems

When you’re starting in or at a new business, what’s one of the first things you usually get? A new set of business cards.

There’s always the rare, cool business card. A good number of cards fall into the average category and then there’s the totally ineffective ones. Websites tend to be the same way. The last thing you want is to have your old-school or online marketing efforts to be ineffective. Sadly, it’s a common occurrence.

For this post, I will give you my top ten list of design and other mistakes for business cards:

1. Inkjet or laser printed cards – Nothing says small time like a temporary card. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. I know. I have done them in the past, but I have tried to get the cleanest edge possible. If your card looks like you could use it as an emergency saw, that’s probably not a good thing, unless you’re selling emergency saws. Also, make sure your inkjet or laser isn’t running out of ink or toner. That sends the signal that your business might just be on its last legs. You want the best, most professional business card you can afford. They say first impressions are everything, and your business card often is.
2. Spelling and grammar errors – Being a bit of a stickler for spelling and grammar can be kind of a curse, but you want people like me to look over your card. Search me out. I might not be perfect, but I’m better than most. Wake me in the middle of the night. Message me on Facebook. Whatever you do, make sure I see your card before it goes to print! When I see these kinds of errors, I wonder what other details you might miss in your work.
3. Dog-eared cards – If your cards come out of your wallet looking like they’ve come from an archeological site, don’t hand them out. Nothing says unprofessional like a jam stain or if your card looks like you salvaged it from a crime scene. Make sure they stay nice, crisp and clean. Invest in a business card carrier of some sort.
4. Logo problems – This one really drives me up the wall. I can’t tell you how many logos look like they’ve been scanned out of the phone book. Or, maybe you’re going for that effect. Mostly, people aren’t though. It doesn’t cost that much to hire someone to produce a professional logo for you. You can use the logo and the colours throughout your advertising and marketing.
5. What do you do? – It’s surprising just how many cards out there don’t indicate what it is that the person does, at least in terms of their business. How obvious is that? When I’m looking through my wallet after a networking session, I should be able to look at your card and at least know what your business is about, even if I can’t remember you. And don’t make it cryptic. So often I find that it gets cryptic when it involves multi-level marketing. A short, tightly worded phrase describing what your business does is ideal. If your business has a website, you can apply this principle there.
6. What do you do v.2? – I do like to know whom I’m dealing with. Are you the president or do you work in the mailroom. This problem doesn’t appear quite so often, but I haven’t seen it. We’re all egomaniacs to an extent, so we like to let people know how important we are. Make sure you do too.
7. Too much information – This is the flip side of ‘what do you do?’ Please, use white space! Don’t try to cram too much into your card. Besides, if you tell me too much, I might decide I’m just not interested. Give me enough to get me interested and follow up with a phone call.
8. Redundancy – Do we really need to let people know that a web address is a web address by actually saying ‘website?’ Hasn’t the Internet been around long enough that if you see ‘www’ that it’s a web address? The same goes for email addresses. Do people use the @ sign often enough that people get confused when they see it? Qualifying whether a phone number is a cell, home, business or fax number is still valid though. One rare one I see is facsimile. That sure sends me back. It’s okay if you’re going for a retro vibe on your card.
9. That was inappropriate – A rarer problem I have seen is that of an unusual email address. We all have friends that seem to be shameless when it comes to their email addresses. I don’t need to describe them to you, but they often end with the number 69. Use your imagination for the rest. I guess it’s okay to have those addresses for personal email, but please don’t use them for your professional email address, unless of course, that is your profession.
10. Not handing them out – What’s the point of having them if you’re not going to give them away? Your business card is like your license to sell. Might as well help your company out by making sure they have to buy you a whole new set of cards. And when they do, make sure your new cards don’t violate the first nine suggestions in this list.

In my top ten list I mentioned how many times I’ve seen serious problems with a business’ logo. It is a really sad situation to see that because logo design can be expensive, but you can find talented artists whose work can fit almost any budget.

This is one area where you can really tie in your online marketing efforts and traditional marketing. Once you have a quality logo, make sure you use it everywhere. When you’re placing ads in a magazine or newspaper, make sure they get the computer file with your high quality logo.

Having worked at a newspaper designing ads, I have been forced to scan logos. I always cleaned them up as best I could, but not everyone does. I would have preferred to have a quality logo to work with to give the advertiser a better looking ad.

Using this logo doesn’t stop at newspaper or magazine ads and business cards. It can easily be adapted to your company’s website. Your whole company’s image can flow from a high quality, attractive logo. There are certainly people out there who can speak to this with more experience and authority on this topic.

That was a cool card!

It seems like everyone has a business card, and most of them are pretty run of the mill. Every once in a while, you run into someone that has a really cool card. I’m not just talking about a nicely designed card, but something that really grabs your attention and makes you go ‘wow!’

One of my favourites is a metal card, but it’s cut out to look like an old fashioned razor blade. It’s from a graphic designer that does cutting edge design. That’s slick.

You’ll see from the site that they have a nice collection of cool business card designs. Here’s the first collection they did.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of online marketing, but I still think that old school marketing methods can be very effective too, especially when they’re tied to your online marketing.

Business cards are an inexpensive and effective way to market, if it’s done properly. Networking, or looking for opportunities to get out and get your business card into the hands of those who might be interested in your services, is still one of the most important skills to have in business.

Alain Saffel 

Alberta’s dead ducks and public relations

There is nothing worse than bad publicity. If you’re Paris Hilton, then I guess any publicity is good publicity. If you are running a “normal” business, then you don’t really want to rock the boat too much.

If you end up with 500 dead ducks in your tailings pond and someone anonymously reports it, you have a problem. This is the story happening in Alberta right now. The whole world seems to know about it.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with Internet marketing? Well, it’s not directly related, but it goes to how your company is viewed. Your company’s image isn’t just about the messages you send out every day. How your company is viewed is also about how you handle a crisis.

It’s hard not to get tarred and feathered, so to speak, when an issue like this happens, but there are ways to mitigate the damage. The media is going to do its best to find out who knew what and when, so this one is a good example of how you should and should not handle crisis communications.

How to avoid issues blowing up in your face:

Have a communications plan: anticipate problems, plan courses of action, nominate spokespeople. You have an idea what kinds of things can happen in your business, so plan for it. Assume if it can go wrong that it will and what you’ll do when it does. By failing to plan, you’re planning to fail: how many times have I said that?

Defuse potential problems: You’ll be sorry if the media gets a sense you’re trying to hide something. They will fry you, but it will be your own fault. You can help defuse this type of situation by striking preemptively. If something bad happens, send out a news release immediately. You’ll have the advantage in helping to set the tone of the conversation, look like you’re working to solve the situation (because, presumably, you are) and you won’t look like you’re trying to cover it up. If you know the problem is bigger than the media knows, you can bet they’ll find out. Just admit it.

Be honest: I know this can be hard for some people, but it’s surprising how honesty and a real apology can help. If you’ve done something wrong, just own up to it. The side benefit on this is that it might help shorten up the news cycle on your story. Won’t that take some wind out of your critics’ sails by saying “yes, we did it, we were wrong. Sorry.”? There’s a lot to be said for doing the right thing.

Listen to people: It makes sense to avoid a situation in the first place. Involve your PR people in important decisions in your company. Let them contribute. Listen to what they have to say. If your PR guy is worried about the optics of something, maybe there’s a reason. If your company experts warn you not to do something, maybe they know something you don’t.

So often PR people are viewed negatively, but they don’t have to be. PR people can serve an important role in an organization, almost like a conscience. Some organizations could really use that, but I’m not naming names.

Bad publicity is sticky on the Internet

Sometimes bad things happen, but the key to how well you’ll come out of it is how well you handle it.

Handle it poorly, and the effects will last for years. The Internet has a long memory, fortunately for some, unfortunately for others. Would you rather handle something well, like the Tylenol poisonings years ago? In PR, it’s like the gold standard of handling a bad situation. A bunker mentality makes you look guilty.

I’d say Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has handled the issue fairly well. He’s criticized the company for failing to live up the terms of its license and failure to immediately report the incident. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is also critical of Syncrude. Their PR people are handling it well, but it’s kind of a no-brainer. Are they going to defend the company? Not likely.

Those bad stories seem to stick around forever on the Internet though. Every time someone searches for your company, if you’ve had some bad publicity, they’ll see it, and it’s not easy to get rid of. You’ll probably never get rid of it. So, handle it well, and you’ll end up looking better than you could have. Handle a crisis well and hopefully it will become a non-issue and people searching for your company won’t be reminded of it every time they’re looking for you.

Alain Saffel 

Blogging, Advertising, Google AdWords, Facebook

I had an interesting link sent to me by Taylor at CodFedChat about blogging and making money at it. His basic premise is that you’re not going to make a million dollars being a blogger, and he’s very likely right.

There are few people out there making a lot of money blogging. Don’t ask me to name them because I’m not that much of a blogging fan-boy that I can name any famous bloggers. That being said, there are definitely people out there making money from blogging. Some do it through Google AdWords and some do it through reviews. Some bloggers have banner ads and some get paid by blogs to write.

If you’re making money blogging, you might be more likely to be doing it for the company you work for. You’re on the clock. That’s not a bad thing.

I agree with Taylor that people should get rid of the ads on their blogs if they’re not making much money on them. They clutter them up. If you’re running a company blog, you shouldn’t have any ads on there at all, unless it makes sense for the type of blogging you’re doing.

AdSense would not make any sense if you’re running them on your company blog and your competitors’ ads are showing up on your site. Do you really want them to leave your site for them? Yes, you can block them. Do you really want people leaving your site at all though? I won’t even get into talking about blogs that scrape content just to serve up AdSense ads.

What annoys me about blogs and other sites that run ads, is that the ads are so often completely unrelated to the content! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen these junk ads for smilies. I don’t care! If you want any ad campaign to be successful, it has to connect with the content on your site and the visitors to your site.

Anyone who has run a Google AdWords campaign understands this. You generally want to make sure your ads are only being clicked on by people who are searching specifically for what you’re offering. What’s the point of paying for clicks that you have no chance of converting to a sale, sign-up or whatever your goal is?

Ignoring ads

It’s ironic that I would work in the Internet marketing field and routinely ignore ads, but I do. I don’t ignore ads all the time, but like I’ve said before, a lot of them are junk. The goal at our company is to make sure we produce online marketing efforts that aren’t ignored, and we’ve been successful in doing that.

But do people ignore ads all the time? No. And they don’t realize that they don’t. Think about a magazine you read that’s related to one of your hobbies. Do you read the ads? You’re much more likely to because most of the ads in the magazine are targeted to that hobby. You can actually get a lot of useful information out of them because they’re tailored to your subject. You likely won’t consider the ads as intrusive because they can help to contribute to your experience of reading that magazine.

Think about the last time you read a newspaper. How many of the ads did you read? If you’re like many people, you probably look at very few. The typical problem is that the ads aren’t very well targeted and you know from past experience that’s the case. Special sections like homes or automobiles are more targeted.

If a website wants to serve up ads, make money and actually help out the companies advertising with them, they have to really have a good idea what their demographic is. The ads must be targeted to the site’s audience, or they’ll be ignored. I, like most people, rarely see targeted ads on sites, so I ignore them.

Google AdWords

One place where I am more likely to look at ads is when I’m doing a Google search. Those sections above the natural search results, highlighted in very light pink, and to the right of the results are paid results.

They are much more likely to be directly related to what you’re searching for. For businesses this is a great opportunity to advertise. The ads here can be targeted much better and you’re likely to get much better results than for a random banner on an unrelated site. That being said, conversion rates will vary, and you can experiment to get the best ad and the best results.

Facebook ads

Facebook is growing in popularity as a place to advertise. You can target certain demographics quite easily and it doesn’t cost a huge amount to do it. It’s nice that you can limit your daily spend, like you can with AdWords.

If you’re looking to advertise to 20 to 30 year old males in Edmonton that like the Edmonton Oilers, you can do that. It does have its limits, but Facebook works well for this kind of thing.

It’s unfortunate when you see ads on there that aren’t well targeted. It is going to cost you when people click on those ads out of curiosity and they have no intention of dealing with you. When advertising on Facebook, and with Google AdWords, you really want to craft your ads well so that you’re only getting good clicks with potential.

Company blogging

Blogging is just another way for your company to get its message out. They say to do it regularly or don’t do it at all. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before. If you blog at least a few times a week, that ought to be good enough. The more the better, as long as it’s useful information to your reader.

You don’t have to write a book every time you blog, like I tend to do, but short posts of around 250 words, or even less, are fine. If you’re going to write a long post, like this one, hopefully your reader will come away with something useful, though provoking or interesting. And on that note…

Alain Saffel

Editing WordPress

I’m finally getting used to editing my blog site….after 2 years.

I was playing around with the new site for Propel Magazine and I saw a theme that I really liked. I hope you like it too as you are reading in it now I needed to change a few things, and I usually rely on someone else to do that. I figured I would give it a shot and I actually figured it out. I still need to change the color for one of the fonts, pink doesn’t go with my red.

I think it’s important to get a fresh look from time to time, to keep things moving. I feel like clearpath has changed so much over the last year, that it’s time for a new look, feel….really a whole new site. I’ll attach a screenshot of the site we’re looking at moving to, let me know what you think.

Stumble spam and Stumble junk

Spamming is such a pain, and it appears that people are beginning to use one of my favourite sites to do the same thing.

I’ve written about Stumbleupon before. It’s a great tool to make surfing more interesting and to be able to see what other Stumblers find interesting.

I just happened to be checking out PeekYou. It’s something I unofficially stumbled across while looking for someone online. Interesting site, so I decided to add it to my Stumbles. On my work profile I like to add to my Stumble by blogging about it. When you do that, you see other recent users who have added that as a Stumble.

So, here’s what I discovered. If you look at several of the users (which I always do, just to see if there’s interesting stuff they are looking at) you’ll notice that all of their Stumbles are virtually identical. WTF?

Stumbleupon can definitely help to get more traffic going to your site, especially when you have something interesting or cool. Everyone gives your site the thumbs up and more Stumblers will end up there.

It’s a shame that some people have to artificially manipulate things. So, keep that in mind if you’re Stumbling and you run across a junky/spammy site. Don’t just Stumble on to the next one. Give it a thumbs down. Aside from reporting this type of activity to Stumbleupon, it’s a simple way to combat it. I am sure it’s not going to help a site if everyone is giving it a thumbs down.

You can check it out for yourself. Here are eight of the users I found doing this: Geniss, Janyee, Sebastan, Songyi, Violaia, Charpman, Selinna, Jourele. By the time you read this, will the pages have changed? Not sure.

There are certainly more. I haven’t looked that far into it. I suspect they’re probably just BS profiles set up rather than separate individuals behind it. Really, it would be easy to do. Have your list of sites, set up a new profile, surf the sites, give them each the thumbs up, then move on to the next profile and do the same. I am sure this type of thing is outsourced to India where it’s a lot cheaper to do it.

I happened to randomly stumble on to this method of spamming. Apparently it’s an issue that’s already being discussed. The discussion is interesting and one user doesn’t really see it as spam. I suppose from the Stumbleupon perspective, it’s not, because users have agreed to receive it.

I suppose you could equate this with artificial means of increasing PageRank in Google. I doubt this would have any consequences to the subject page’s Google ranking, but Google seems to loathe any type of artificial manipulation of rankings.

What it does make you wonder is that if the owner of a page is engaging in artificial methods of increasing the popularity of their pages, what other artificial means are they engaging in? It opens the door to anyone with a vendetta (competitor) to try and have your site penalized by Google and other search engines. Why take the risk?

While it might take longer, the safest route to having a site that ranks well is to have good content, updated regularly and let people know about it. After a while, you build an audience and hopefully it will become viral from there. Engaging in any kind of artificial schemes or black hat SEO is not the way you want to increase traffic to your site, particularly if you are looking long term.

Alain Saffel 

Not another social networking tool!!

I recently joined Twitter, at the urging of one of my colleagues, and it started me thinking, as things so often do.

The buzz about social networking and how you have to be on this and you have to be on that gets a little overwhelming after a while.

They say that if you’re going to social network, go big or go home. What it means is that you have to keep things up to date, and if you don’t, you might as well not do it.

So, you should blog, you should be on Facebook, you should be on Dig, Sphinn, Twitter, Stumbleupon, etc. Did I forget MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo or WAYN? I found a good list of social networking sites on Wikipedia. I would include things like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger as well. Yahoo and MSN don’t have quite the capability for networking that the others do, but it’s all about keeping in touch.

It’s something that is likely to induce a little anxiety. Just imagine being in my business where we have to keep on top of these trends!

The real question is not how do I keep up with all of them, but which ones make sense to keep up with? It is impossible to keep up with them all and you shouldn’t believe the hype. What you need to do is take a long look at your business, check out the different forms of social networking and Internet tools and determine which ones make the most sense for you to keep up with and which ones could help your business.

Blogging and Twittering: micro-blogging

It’s not the end of the world if you don’t write down every last thing you’re doing every day on Twitter, which I’ve heard described as a micro-blog. Frankly, there are many things I don’t want to hear about.

It is recommended that you do at least one blog entry per day, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. If you would like to keep regular readers, it would be good to blog regularly. They don’t have to be epics either. Try to keep them to 200 to 300 words, unless you’ve got really interesting and compelling things to say. Sometimes, you can’t say it all in only 300 words, so don’t worry about it.

My personal blog is in the process of being retired because I just don’t have much to say on it anymore. I’m planning to set up a new blog that reflects the changes in my life, but not yet. I’m not too anxious about it.

I do blog here when I can. This is a business blog, as you may have gathered. I do try to blog regularly, but you get busy with client work, and that’s how it goes. I would rather make sure my posts are solid and on interesting topics rather than coming up with weak topics on a daily basis. Besides, with RSS, you can get the posts as feeds, so when it comes is not such as big deal. What do you think?

Cutting through the hype

There probably are businesses out there that can’t take advantage of Internet marketing and social networking. With a little creativity, I am sure I could come up with ways that any business could. That’s all part of being innovative and on the cutting edge.

First off, I would recommend to pick only the number of social networking tools that you’re comfortable keeping up with. Pick three you can keep relatively up to date. I’m using Facebook, blogs and Twitter. Oh, and LinkedIn. And Stumbleupon. I could take my own advice, couldn’t I?

Pick too many and something will suffer. If they don’t suffer, business must be slow because you’d have to spend a lot of time keeping up.

Twittering and Stumbling

I have been devoting more of my energy to Twitter and Stumbleupon. I like being able to make short posts about what I think about something or the interesting things I run across every day. It doesn’t take too much time from my usually busy days.

Social networking benefits

There’s no question that there are a lot of benefits to using these social networking tools. Here’s a few:

1. Link love – If people like what you are saying or doing, they might link to you. Natural links are the best, which is what you’re going for here. It helps to boost your Google PageRank and general visibility of your site on the web.
2. Networking – All these tools end up doing is functioning like coffee shops used to, and still do. They’ll never replace getting out and meeting face to face, but there are advantages to them. I’m now friends with an Australian woman on Facebook who now lives in Belgium. Try doing that at your local Starbucks. It’s all about building relationships.
3. Fun – Do it because you like it. It is fun. If you don’t think it’s fun, well, maybe it’s not for you. It shouldn’t be a chore. Of course, if it is for business, don’t tell your boss it’s fun.
4. Business – Let people know what you’re up to. It might pay off. Done well, it definitely can, but there are never any guarantees. At the very least, these types of activities let your customers, fans and potential customers know a little about what you’re doing. It’s pull marketing.

While there are definitely benefits to doing all of this, make sure you’re doing it because you like it. It tends to come through when people are just doing all these things to try and generate more business, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It sort of grates against the whole idea of sharing on the web for sharing’s sake. There are still a bunch of purists out there who are still annoyed at businesses using the web. It’s so 1999.

For smaller businesses without a dedicated marketing staff, it would be wise to keep things small and manageable when it comes to social networking. Keep it natural and genuine. And above all, think about your reader: make sure what you’re sharing is engaging, interesting and potentially useful to that reader. Do this and it will keep them coming back.

Alain Saffel

Facebook marketing

We ran our Real Estate Disruptor seminar on Facebook marketing last week.

By all accounts it was a success, and everyone received a lot of valuable information.

While the seminar was focused on how real estate agents can use Facebook as part of their marketing, there were guests from a number of other businesses in attendance. The principles apply to any business.

The seminar started off with Walter Schwabe of FusedLogic speaking about branding, push and pull marketing and Web 2.0. Walter is an excellent public speaker and I don’t think anyone was falling asleep in the morning seminar.

Dave Cree gave a presentation on Facebook marketing. He polled the audience and built several ads for the crowd to see. It gave them a pretty good sense of how easy it is to build and target the ads on Facebook.

While it is easy to do, when you have experience, many people get hung up on the wording of their ads. It causes a great deal of anxiety, and many just aren’t good at it. There are always ways around it.

I talked to many interesting people there and I even got some promotional mileage for my Facebook group Cleaning Up Edmonton. I started this group as a way of trying to help clean up the city and it was used as an example of building community, which is key on Facebook.

When was this?

I really should be ashamed of myself for blogging this the week after it happened. These are the kinds of things that should be kept up to date, as we covered in the seminar.

It is understandable why these things sometimes are pushed down on the priority list. Client work really is the priority, so when they’re calling, they are the number one focus.

Not everyone likes to blog at the end of the day. I’m going to try to get it done in the morning as a way of warming up my writing muscles. That’s the plan: coffee and a review of what’s happening out there in the world of SEO, SEM and Internet marketing.

Alain Saffel 

Stumbleupon - sharing and linking

There was a point a couple years ago that I found surfing the web to have become quite boring. It was boring until I found Stumbleupon.

The great thing about Stumbleupon is that you set it up, install the tool bar, and put in all the information about the subjects you’re interested in. Then, hit the Stumble button, and you’re whisked off to a site that is in your range of interests.

You can rate the sites you like, comment on them and check out what other Stumble users are looking at. I should warn you now, this site can be addictive! If you’re going to have it at work, you could set up another work-related profile so you’re only Stumbling on work related sites. I also have a non-work related profile, so I can Stumble on all the other things I’m interested in.

I decided to set up my work-related profile, and I think I’ll find it to be a really good research tool. I’ll be able to quickly access interesting sites related to the search engine optimization (SEO) field and hopefully find some interesting sites to contribute.

Another nice feature of Stumbleupon is that you can join groups within it so you can share information with like-minded Stumblers. I’ve joined groups on search engine marketing, SEO, blogging, online business and more. Almost any topic you can think of will have a group for it, and probably many for topics you’d never even considered.

One aspect I really like about Stumbleupon is the toolbar. Probably its best feature is being able to email a link from your desktop without having to login to your email. I regularly send links I think might be useful to people I know. It is quick and easy.

So give Stumbleupon a try. Don’t blame me when you’ve spent the whole day surfing though. I think I might need to join a 12 step group to deal with my Stumbleupon addiction!

Does your website need a spring cleaning?

The other day there was a story on CBC Edmonton about the garbage problem in our fair city. This one was about the stuff that doesn’t make it into the can. It’s a problem I have with the house I’m renting too. The hedge seems to catch all the garbage blowing by and funnel it into my yard. Time for a spring cleaning.

It occurred to me that anyone who owns a website should be looking at that site in the same way. No, not that it funnels garbage into your yard, but doing a spring cleaning.

Too often the attitude is that once the site is up, we can forget about it. I see indicators of that attitude on a regular basis. A website really needs to be a work in progress. If it isn’t updated regularly and improved, who is going to use it? There will be some, but keeping visitors coming back should be our goal, rather than just an online brochure.

I see a variety of problems with sites through my lens of a writer, marketing guy and SEO guy, all in one. Some of them are:

Grammar and spelling issues

This is an easy one to fix, but probably one of the biggest ones I see. Even if you just use a spell checker, that would be an improvement. If your site is too big and you’re not the world’s best speller or even an English teacher, hire someone to look it over. Or, if it’s small, get your mom.

Grammar can be a tougher issue. It really depends on your audience and how formal you need to be. You generally want to conform to the standard rules of the language. But, it’s okay to violate them if it serves a purpose. It makes it tough to be viewed as an authority on anything if you’re seen as being barely literate.

Regular website updates

I understand that many people might view their sites as online brochures, and there is nothing wrong with that. Even if that’s the case, you can still keep it up to date and communicate with your customers, viewers or visitors.

Providing value to your visitors will keep them coming back. You could write a book about this topic, and some already have. You need to update your site regularly, and by that I mean more than once a year. Why not have a blog tied to your site and update it once a week at the very least?

I’m not going to be the pot calling the kettle black here, because I have neglected my blogs as well. I’ll admit it.

Bad design

I really don’t want to pick on any sites, but you know what I mean when I say bad design. If your site looks bad, visitors can’t figure out how to navigate your site or it is the subject of jokes around the proverbial water cooler, you need to make some changes. A fresh look, something easy to accomplish with a CSS site (ask your web developer), might be in order.

A Microsoft Front Page site that was built in 1999 might have been okay then, but now it’s quaint, if not downright ugly.

I include Flash sites under bad design, because Flash sites, typically, aren’t searchable by the search engines you want to have a look at your site, namely Google and Yahoo! It’s tempting to have a cool, all Flash site. Resist the urge to be assimilated.

A bit of Flash is okay; all Flash is not. It’s a bit like having solid gold teeth versus just having one gold front tooth. Wait, maybe that was a bad example.

Site architecture

This one is huge. All it means is how your site is laid out. What do you call the pages? How do you organize your ideas?

Before you even get into the design of your site, you need to do a chart or somehow rationalize how your site is going to be organized. I see so many sites where they’ve seemingly glossed over this idea.

It ties into the whole marketing process, no matter what kind of site you’re running. By not having your site well organized, potential customers get a subconscious feeling that you’re really not on the ball.

Your site architecture will vary, depending on what you’re doing, but make sure it makes sense from a customer point of view. And make absolutely sure that it is easy for your site’s visitors to navigate.

Technical issues

I am one of those people who love to look at a site’s source code. I’m not a programmer, but I look for certain things, like a page title, keywords and description. There are lots of other important details, but through my lens, I look at those.

Keywords are my company’s bread and butter and from these, all other things flow. Your keywords really describe your company and how visitors find you in search engines. It’s an often neglected part of a site.

There is a great deal of debate about whether or not search engines use them anymore, but some do, and others, we’re not sure. It’s not hard to put them into your meta tags, and you need to make sure to use them in your site content. It helps you get picked up by, and ranked higher, in search engines. It’s like the Holy Grail.

Your page titles need to be descriptive and meaningful. You will see them in the search engine results pages, so make sure they’re done well.

The meta description tag is still useful. I know on sites I have worked on where I add the description tag, that’s what shows up in Google. Do you want Google or Yahoo! to just pick a random part of your content to show to searchers, or do you want to have some control over that? It’s all part of your marketing message.

Content is king. Don’t forget it.

These are just some of the things, sometimes referred to as SEO (search engine optimization), I look at when working with an Edmonton client. One of the important ways to get to the top of the search engine rankings is to have useful content. Useful, relevant, keyword-rich content is no guarantee of getting there, but it will be a big help, along with a variety of other strategies we use to help clients get on to page one.

I am looking at all of my websites to make sure I’m on top of these issues. It’s never a bad thing to contemplate the changes that need to be made and get some ideas on how they could be made better. Once I’m done that, I’ll tackle the garbage accumulating in my yard and hedge!

If you got any suggestions, questions or anything to add, feel free to comment.

Alain Saffel

From Traditional Media to New Media, A Story About a Bridal Show

We recently sat down with Bill from InteractiveBridalShow.com. Bill was working with some local radio stations to get the message out to ladies getting married to sign up for his Interactive Online Wedding Planner.

After spending many thousands of dollars, Bill was a bit disappointed at the number of sign-ups he was receiving. We started a Facebook marketing campaign just over a week ago. In this campaign we targeted women over the age of 21 who had marked “engaged” in their status; nicely targeted.

In the first week, 63 women have signed up for their online wedding planner and we spent just over a hundred dollars. The ROI comparison is too embarrassing for our local radio stations to even mention. You can figure it out!

The moral of the story is that traditional media does have it’s place, but if you’re looking for the most effective strategy to generate leads for your business, you may want to start by looking at some of the new media strategies like Facebook marketing before spending thousands of dollars.

Dave