COMMENTS
Thank you. I am in the middle of a website redesign and I have recently been wondering what it is really worth. I have known that I need to take a look at my content but now I'm thinking I should focus on that instead. I really haven't done that lately.
I completely agree with your game plan which is why we're one of your new customers. However, our customers ARE artists! I am constantly being told...we don't need your service because I am building or already have my own website. When asked for further details...they want to have a site that is unique and shows off their artistic talents which means their site will sit out there in cyberspace all alone, they will never be able to use it or make changes to the site themselves, they won't build up content unless they are blogging about themselves all the time or have the remotest idea of how to market thru the Internet!
While I understand your point..."leave the works of art to the galleries and museums", what DO I tell the artists who are trying to build a personal website that is a work of art knowing it's a complete and total waste of time....any suggestions? I'm always looking for a better way to try and communicate your points thru my blog.
Betsy, President & Co-Founder ArtId
These are great tips and people need to remember “A business website is a business tool and should deliver business results.” This article was assuming that the objective of a business site is to convert. Maybe this is a topic for a future article – I still struggle with using our Web site as a business tool and providing resources for current clients as well using the site for my main objective, creating leads. Since creating leads is my priority, it wins, but others in the company want to use the site to save them time and reduce their workload. Is there a happy medium?
@Scott H... I don't see why the goals are mutually exclusive. If you really need a site that just serves information to clients, start an extranet like success.hubspot.com
@Betsy.... Bottom line is that artists need traffic. If someone says, "I already have a website", I'd ask them "Have you sold any artwork through it yet?" "How do people find your website?"
Great webinar, Mike. Thanks for the focus on content and protecting website assets. Wondering, is your landing page software offered on its own?
You mention every website should have a blog. I agree. However, as web design company, we find it is often hard to convince clients that they should not only have a blog, but also post blog entries every week or so. They are often not interested in maintaining a blog, because of the time it takes - they are busy running whatever business they have. They often view the success of their website as the responsibility of the web design company. Here's where the content issue comes in. Any tips on how to convince a client they should invest the time it takes to run a successful blog? Really, the same goes for any kind of fresh website content, which the client should be adding frequently.
Thanks for the great webinar, Mike! I think you touched on some great points regarding interruption vs permission based marketing. I'd really like to hear about any tools you may have for tracking social media (digg, delicious, facebook, youtube, etc) metrics besides websitegrader. Great job!
Your comments about design are red herrings. Any design professional knows and expects design to be driven by criteria. If your criteria doesn't involve the components that drives sales & revenue, then you get what you get. Design and content have to be partners in achieving the success criteria. Making a case that design is only cosmetic is disingenuous or ignorant.
Great webinar. Ok - Sorry but I do not think every company should have a blog. Here is my 10 cents that works for my clients. Let's assume you are a small company of less than 5 employees or just yourself. Your site serves a local market and has very little traffic. You are trying to establish your company on the world wide web to drive traffic to your site but want the local market to call - not the world. Therefore - if you are trying to establish a name for your company on the web and create more buzz about your company - post on someone else's blog or media site that serves your local market. Find the top 5-10 websites with blogs or social media sites or directories where you can leave comments. Sign-up for their feeds and emails AND when you have an appropriate comment to make on the blog where your prospects are going - do it. This will help you get known, get fresh content and I promise you will get clicks and calls. I hope this insight helps.
Great Webinar. Any particular reason you left out the keyword meta tag in your basic SEO other then Google not giving it any weight?
Hello Mike,
Thank you for the webinar. I have a couple of questions regarding website updates and SEO:
1. For a new website, how important is it to have the latest HTML code, i.e. XHTML 1.0 vs. HTML? Is there anymore bang to the buck in terms of SEO?
2. For HubSpot's web content system, are there many templates to choose from?
@robert r - on convincing clients to update content.
Lead by example.
Make sure you have access to their blog article submission and start blogging for them. If you are not an expert in their industry then blog from a customers perspective. As a consultant for their business site you should be learning about their business anyway - blog about what you learn. If appropriate bill the time but make sure you have the metrics to back up the costs. Then it simply becomes the business owners decision to blog themselves if they think they can do it for less cost.
@Jaqueline S. We do not sell our landing page software (or any feature) by itself. The value is in the whole and there are some very cool integration points between analytics, lead intelligence and landing pages that help our clients be a lot more successful than if they just had a tool to easily build landing pages. I encourage you to request a custom demo of the software.
@Robert R. When talking to a small business owner, you should ask them, "Is there anything more important in your business than generating more leads and more new clients?" If they tell you the the truth and they say "no, that's most important", then all you need to do is convince them that blogging will help them do that. If you don't think you can handle that, request a demo and one of our sales people can show why blogging is an amazing SEO, lead nurturing, word of mouth and link building tool that ultimately helps generate leads. We, and many of our clients, generate a good portion of their traffic, leads and business because of blogging. Take a look at our case studies for more supporting material if you need it.
@brett. We are all about helping clients generate traffic, leads and business. So, our analytics helps them measure their social media along those metrics... to ultimately help marketers calculate an ROI. If you're looking for something that tracks mentions of your business, there's lots of free services like google alerts, blogdigger, technorati and then there's a bunch of cool paid services. Google "social media monitoring" and you'll get a bunch of options.
@Dave. Mike is extremely disingenuous and ignorant. You hit that nail on the head. NOT. Your point that design doesn't need to be sacrificed for purpose is well said. However, if a small business owner is deciding between spending 5k on design or 5k on software and internet marketing services, I'd suggest the latter. Design, no matter how nice, is not going to attract a larger audience. The phrase that we like to use around is "billboard in a desert". In an ideal world, companies shouldn't have to decide. And I don't think they really do. If small business owners and marketers knew how the web could generate business for them, they'd be less concerned about colors, fonts, etc. In an ideal world, all internet marketers would be great designers and all designers would be great internet marketers. Unfortunately, that's not the case. All Mike is doing is educating people about how to invest in their site in order to make it work for the business. I don't think that's ignorant or dishonest.
@Lia. I have many clients who are small local businesses, as does HubSpot in general. They should blog and create content on their own site, then build links to their site. Your clients may be successful by putting content on other sites that links back to them. But, they'd be 10x more successful if they first published great content on their site and then built links, built a community, build a subscriber base, etc that could then be tapped to generate leads and referrals. It's hard to do that if you're not hosting the party.
@Gary. As a business owner, you shouldn't be worried about what code your site is written. To answer your question, the front end of your site should be using XHTML and css, which HubSpot's CMS takes care of for you. Also, our themes (we don't like to call them templates) are extremely customizable. I encourage you to contact someone at HubSpot and have them show you some implementations. I believe we're also working on a gallery.
Is there a way to tell if your website NEEDS a redesign?
I like the inventory process before the site redesign. Too many designers simply deconstruct the old site without looking at current performance. Maybe the site is getting a good number of visitors that buy but has low customer loyalty. The site could have a low conversion rate but a good number of visitors. After looking at current site performance the mission and goals of the redesign should be written to keep the project on track.
In answer to Dan Tyre about when your site needs a redesign, I think it is somewhat simple. When it is not performing based on your sites goals/objectives. If you have a site without a plan. You should sit and write a detailed site plan which includes measurable goals. Without that how do you know if it is doing what you need. Hope this helped.
I am having trouble downloading the slides from the presentation yesterday. I am getting a "Page not Found" error.
@Emily - We fixed the link so you should be able to download the slides. I'll also email them directly to dyou.
is there any designer in the crowd who has done any studies on colors and how to use them best - which work best for men, women, kids, business, retail etc. etc. any research you know of that is specific to website design?
The picture of the empty Apple store must have been taken after hours. I've been there on a Tuesday morning and it's PACKED.
@Arthur E - Try http://websitetips.com/color/tutorials/ it has some useful info & resources. Also some basics at http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art1686.asp. Hope it helps.
I've heard horror stories of sites losing all their Google rankings after a redesign. Is this purely due to not conserving all the exact URLs, or are there any other factors (like a different navigation or internal linking structure). In our new redesign, we're planning to do a lot of clean-up of menu and category creep and don't want to destroy all we've built. Thanks.
One minor reason we were looking to do a new design was to take two websites and merge them into one website. However, Hubspot has two websites; hubspot.com and webgrader.com. Can you discuss the pro's and con's of this type of two website scenario around SEO?
Thanks,
I second Gary's question!
(thanks for the great question, Gary)
this was a very long webinar, I drank 2 beers while listening to it. now that i'm drunk, i can't remember what it was about? don't make a pretty face, make content? attract and convert? and what does hubsnot do? why is it called hubspto? what it the hub, why is it called spot. how do you convert using content? what kind of content converts? what kind of content attracts? how do you know what kywords are working? utoh seems like i am sobering up. i better drink another beir.
Thanks for the webinar, Mike! Great to see all these ideas in one place.
I would also be interested in hearing about combining websites. We are in the process and I'm thinking we need to duplicate the link and page structure to keep our ranking, etc. I've seen 301's implemented, but not as successful as it could have been if they'd stuck to the original architecture.
Good ideas, especially Seth's. I just hired Sandy Renshaw (at Purple Wren) to help me redo my website at TiberiusPublications.com
Another thing to keep in mind when deciding if a web site NEEDS to be redesigned is whether or not it is "search engine friendly" (easy for the search engine to index). If you have a site that cannot be indexed because it was built with Flash, for instance, it should be redone.
It may possible to rewrite portions of the site rather than doing a redesign.
Things to consider:
* Get rid of framed pages
* Replace old navigation with styled text links
* Simplify URLs - remove special characters.
* Replace HTML font tags with CSS.
* If you used a graphic for an element rather than text for aesthetics reasons, RECONSIDER. Search engines can't read graphics.
Also become familiar with seo rules (available on search engine sites such as Google) and follow them.
* Don't keyword spam
* Don't used hidden text
DO
* Use alt tags, unique title tags and descriptions on each page.
* Submit a site map and keep it up to date.
Wonderful post, previously I have went through many pages but I haven't satisfied with all those content. Your page has made me to think broad about the marketing and it helped a lot in finding great way.
I enjoyed your webinar - I always come away from HubSpot webinars thinking "Well that was time well spent."
But at the risk of being the worm in the salad here, I must disagree with one point. Nothing moves my mouse to the back button faster than a Web site with a lousy design. Obviously we - and I include myself here - can't all afford to have our sites created by top designers, but a design that's easy on the eye is as important for Web content as it is for newspapers, magazines, brochures and other maketing tools.
Sure you can sell a tube of lipstick in a skanky tabloid just as effectively as you can sell it in Vanity Fair. But you don't hear experts telling magazine designers to value content over design.
Sure, we have to worry about whether or not our page features are going to lead to conversions or not, but there's no reason for it to be at the cost of aesthetics.
Maybe I've opened one-too-many overstated hardsell marketing emails lately...but sometimes I feel like we're all going to hell in a hideous hand basket. We appreciate beautiful car brochures or quality magazines, we enthusiastically anticipate great ads during the Super Bowl...most people just enjoy pleasing marketing.
I don't see any good reason standards should drop just because we've introduced a new medium. Don't get me wrong Mike, your points here are all valid as they always are, but if we sacrifice our sense of aesthetics for the Internet it will turn into the online equivalent of the trash I get in my mail box every day.
@Carolyn - You make a good point - I too, will leave a site immediately if it's cluttered or unprofessional or overloaded with weird ads.
I think the idea is not to kill yourself over a pretty design. I think it's important to display content in a professional, clear way, and if your website is unprofessional or chaotic, this does not reflect well on the company.
There's a happy medium in there - where you can create an effective, compelling corporate website instead of attempting a new groundbreaking work of art.
I enjoyed this webinar very much! I keep reviewing it from time to time. I redesigned my web site and launched in January 2008. It is a simple design with easy large navigation and good size fonts. I found that in the first 4 months of 2008, I exceeded the visitor count of 2007!
The web site is not flashy. Its a full CSS based design.
I believe from the point of view of the customer it works very well, providing them with easy navigation and the information they seek.
Although I would like to redesign it a little, I agree wholeheartedly with adding more content, and making content more optimized.
This is a very valuable webinar!
Thanks for a great webinar. Are there any plans to expand outside the US and Canada?
Thanks, Martin (UK)
Great info. I'm curious about your response to presentations at New Marketing Summit saying to ditch forms because they turn away 90% of your visitors yet you recommend forms as a way to capture lead data. Is Documetrics or some other embedded form capture solution an option? Should registration be optional to get valuable content like research reports?
@Tamara Gruber - It is a balance. I think some of your activities need to offer free information without a lead form (like this blog or Website Grader). And then some of your info/content needs to have a lead form (like our webinars) because of the reality of business and the fact that companies with salespeople need to generate leads. The balance depends on your business model, but you need to do both.
@Martin - Do you mean our HubSpot product expanding beyond US/Canada? We currently do have a number of customers outside North America. If you're interested in actually speaking with someone about this, feel free to request a demo at
http://www.hubspot.com/demo.
Thank you for the FANTASTIC webinar! I discovered on the same day I decided to start a website redesign. I'm still moving forward but with a very different strategy and not changing nearly as much.
It's too bad HubSpot services cost so much, according to the $3500 figure mentioned in the webinar. I'm a sole proprietor and that's 1/3 of my annual gross. But I'm sure the value of your services is equal to that fee for companies who rely more heavily on their website.
Thanks again!