inter:digital strategies

Language is an important aspect of optimizing a website. In many cases, the way you pitch your sale is far more important than what you’re saying. You can’t avoid the issue - making certain your visitors understand and remember your site is absolutely critical.

Kevin Potts, of GraphicPush, wrote the other day about making a prospective client remember your pitch. In it, he points out that you can use fancy words, politically savvy speech, and all your business expertise to make your point - but, when it comes right down to it, the most memorable statement might be:

I make your shit look good so it sells more stuff.

Short, to the point, and says what you do.

Your website needs to consider memorability in addition to any other sales pitch. Granted, cursing at your visitors is possibly not the best tack to take. However, grabbing their attention and seizing the opportunity to make certain they’ve noticed you can be the best thing for your business.

So, what about your site can really seize attention? Obviously, there are "better methods" and "not-so-good methods". You could fill your site with pictures of scantily clad bikini vixens. (Ooh, I’m going to catch some "unique traffic" now.) Of course, this may not be the most appropriate way to move custom-designed office furniture. On the other hand, it may be very effective for selling surfing supplies. Considering your market is pretty critical.

It’s an unfortunate truth that being obnoxious is a great way to catch somebody’s attention. Using pop-up ads or slide-in ads, animated ads - any of these will grab the attention of your visitor. They may be very obnoxious, but they can serve the purpose you need. There are good ways and bad ways to implement them all, however. If you are so obnoxious that you chase your visitor away, you’ve lost your market. But, if you give them an easy way to stop what’s bothering them (close advertisements or stop animations), then they’re more likely to let it pass - and you’re one step closer to making a sale.

Remembering your site is one of the reasons a good domain name is critical. If people are struggling to remember your site’s address (What was that url…digitalstrategy.com? Internetstrategies? Digitalinternetstrategies? Hmmmm…) then they’re less likely to come back. A big part of what makes a site successful is being remembered.

But the core of catching attention and keeping it needs to be in the content of your site. Writing text filled with industry buzzwords and technical terms is a great way to make your site disappear from my memory in 30 seconds. A text laced with unfamiliar terms is keyed to be forgotten. Copy which features well-known, common terminology to explain a task will be much more easily remembered.

Getting visitors to your site is a pretty minor part of effective internet marketing - keeping them there and bringing them back are also important challenges.

ANY child knows that good things happen when grandparents reach for their wallets. Internet executives are starting to remember the feeling.

Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times

The New York Times has just published an article making a lot of noise about the entry of the over-55 audience into the market of e-Commerce. Although the market is far from new, in the past year it has grown significantly. The articles shows that 25.5 percent
of online purchases in the last 6 months were made by the over-55 market - a percentage that no online retailer can afford to ignore.

And this can apply to any number of retail industries. After all, the gift buying power of grandparents is not an insignificant part of the teenager and twenty-something sales market.

Rand Fishkin has covered the article at SEOmoz, and there’s an interesting discussion going on at Cre8asite Forums as well.

The first thing I think of when planning to market to a senior market is web accessibility. The over-55 crowd has a significantly higher likelihood of vision loss or motor control problems, and if I want to appeal to them as an audience, my site must be usable by them.

Insuring that your site is accessible is an important step in any web marketing campaign - there is never added value in exluding any portion of your potential market. An inaccessible site is a bad business decision, and even more so as older generations expand their use of the web.

Verifying qualifications is a subject that comes up from time to time in every field of internet activity. Web development, applications programming, internet marketing, you name it. Various companies offer some kind of certification - Zend offers certification
in PHP programming, Google offers their own Google Advertising Professionals program, SEOtoolset offers a certification program for their tool set. All of these programs have a similar goal - provide professionals with a way of demonstrating to potential employers that they are accomplished and competent.

None of these programs are all that widely recognized or necessarily meaningful. Unlike certification in law practice (being admitted to the bar), certification in psychological therapy practices, or any of the many mainstream certification programs, there is no web certification program that requires continuing education in order to maintain their certification status.

Certification for SEO comes up from time to time in conversations, and earlier this year two separate companies began offering certification programs. The two programs are offered by the Society for Internet Professionals and by SEO Pros. Both of these programs are fairly rigorous, requiring study, courses, and examinations to achieve accreditation. Only one of them, from the SIP, requires any kind of continuing education for accreditation. I feel that this element is absolutely critical in order to give any certification validity.

Specifically, the SIP requires that you renew your certification once every three years. This is, I think, respectable. It is unrealistic to expect a renewal as frequently as the "game" actually changes, but every three years should be sufficient to maintain a valid connection with best practices.

It is my feeling that every area of web development could stand to have such a certification - something where you can achieve some kind of validation of your skills which would require first that you meet a particular standard but second, and most importantly, would require that you continue to further your understanding of the discipline in order to maintain your standing.

It is easy for somebody to accomplish a certification; it is a different matter to keep up with the rapid changes in a technological discipline. It is also a different matter to consistently apply those best practices in your work.

There is a secondary issue surrounding the significance of the accrediting body. An organization needs to have a strong degree of national or international acknowledgement in order to provide a strong certificate - and, I’m afraid, there simply aren’t many web organizations which have that kind of a reputation. Most professional associations in the web world have only minimal representation, or have significant politics surrounding their organizations. Even something as significant in name as the HTML Writer’s Guild is in fact merely a decorative label.

It would be nice, perhaps, if an organization as well respected as the W3C would offer certification programs - this would be one of the few organizations with a high enough name recognition to offer a
truly meaningful accreditation. Of course, then one might find oneself obligated to attempt to meet the requirements of WCAG 2.0.

Other than demonstrated accomplishments (the best recommendation of all), what would
you consider to be a valid indicator of web competence?