Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

Here are the interesting posts at the top of my reading list this week.

The fine folks at the Red Cross are working diligently on crafting a Social Media Policy Handbook.  They’ve got a great start and are light years ahead of even most for-profit businesses. As it should, its available online for your viewing pleasure.

Staying with the non-profit side of things, NPR has a great feature of The Extraordinaries.  Its a micro volunteering iPhone app that allows people to give small blocks of time (< 5 min) and knowledge to a non-profit. Some of the first tasks available are tagging images for the Brooklyn Museum building a map of childhood playgrounds.  It’s a beautiful concept.

SEOMoz updated their SEO Best Practices to account for new industry data.  They clear the air and a lot of confusion in regards to new search engine optimization standards.  The synopsis is H1 tags are not all that necessary anymore, stop trying to sculpt PageRank with nofollow, use footer links, java and flash sparingly, traffic to a site doesn’t determine its ranking and quite a bit more.

Smashing Magazine compiled a great list of web design checklists and resources that will help improve your writing skills.

Rumor has it that Google is experimenting with product ads that would would work very similar to AdWords, but display an image ad along the right hand side of the SERP when the user searches on a particular term.  These ads would run on a pay-per-action basis rather than a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”

Thanks Kenny!

Originally posted January 19, 2009

Developing your web site for mobile devices can be confusing.  What screen size should you optimize for? What device is the most popular?  What content do you keep in, what do you remove?  There are many decisions to make, but allow me to make one suggestion. Save yourself some heartache and instead of using a separate domain such as a .mobi version, use a subdomain such as m.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/mobile. Using a subdomain keeps your brand strong, reduces customer confusion and better optimizes your site for search engines.

Additional Resources:

Mobile Plugins for WordPress – easily make your site viewable on mobile devices.Setting up a Google Analytics filter to track mobile visitors to your site
Designing for the Mobile Web

Google releases geo-performance reporting feature

10 Web Applications for FriendFeed

Social Media Breakfast #6 Memphis and an update from Sharing at Work

Will it Matter in 5 Years?

On Demand WordPress Theme and a nice Thesis Update

The Most Brilliant Outdoor Campaign Ever

How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business and 40 Creative Design Layouts from Smashing Magazine

I also ordered two books: The Leader of the Future 2 and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

A quick thought. Create a webpage for your actual customers – the people who actually visit and use it. Find out what’s relevant and important to them and then go and give it to them. Don’t build a site that will help you, your marketing department, your sales team or anyone else at your organization. Take this mentality with you and see how it changes things – both online and off.

Is your website doing what you designed it to do? Are you looking to redesign or tweak your current site? Here are three starter questions that are critical to guiding website analysis.

1. Who is your target audience?
2. What is your unique selling proposition?
3. What is your main website goal?