Websites > Pretty Faces
It makes me squirm when I see a website that is not built for the long haul, and by long haul, I mean
- easy to find by them there robots
- easy to update by us here humans
If you are not fluent in g33k.com comme moi, you may look at a website and evaluate it solely on its looks. You’ll ask yourself questions like
- Does it look good?
- Does it basically tell peeps what I do?
- Does it have my contact info?
When I look at and design a website, I ask
- Can I deeplink?
- Can an engine read it?
- Is it easy to update?
- How flexible are the page templates?
I ask these questions because
- You can only personally market your product and/or services for as much time in a day as your lips can move; if your website is search-spidey hostile then I hope you have motor mouth
- You shouldn’t have to pay someone boku ducats to tweak product pricing or other info on your website. An intelligently built content management system allows for website operations and maintenance costs to approach zero.
But don’t take my word for it; Denver-based PR and communications consultant Bree Neely sez of her current site:
I can’t go in and add anything… without completely compromising the format
For those of you who are taking notes at home, this is not, in Bree’s mind, a positive thing. So for her redesign, she’s taking into consideration the back end (which does not, as some marketers may wish to believe, take care of itself) as well as the engine readability of the site (this includes stuff like the title tags, site map, all that good stuff).
Websites should be more than pretty faces! They should be hard-working pretty faces. Think beauty contestants with, like, high IQ scores and stuff. That are on your sales team. Forever.
