Beware... You don't want this guy to be your next web marketing expert.

I was reading posts in one of my favourite online forums when I noticed the signature line for one of the users: The Internet – Where anyone with a keyboard is an expert. Truer words have never been spoken and thinking of a recent conversation with one of my clients, I could feel my blood pressure start to rise.

But let’s start with my first reaction. It’s absolutely true (and in many ways wonderful) how the Internet has opened up the world and provided a soapbox for a variety of backyard experts. For example:

Wikipedia – the user-managed encyclopedia of everything.

Podcasts – allowing you to learn about everything from how to lose weight to overcoming your fear of public speaking.

YouTube – Now the world’s 2nd most popular search engine where you can watch and learn how to stop your dog from jumping, install a video card, or what not to do with a van, a ramp and a mountain bike.

The nice thing about these resources is that they are truly “caveat emptor” or “buyer beware”. But it’s easy to watch, read, or listen and make a judgment call as to how much validity you want to put in the “expert’s” skill, ability and experience. If you agree with their advice, take it. If it seems faulty, you may want to pass. Did you watch the bike video? The point is, it’s easy to make a judgement call on the “expert.”

The other reality of that signature line, however, is the part that makes my blood boil. Owning a pen does not make a someone a great author. Owning a camera a does not make someone a great photographer. Owning or watching a TV does not make someone a great producer (although I tend to be able to pick the fall line-up winners better than most TV execs). And owning a computer and some web design software certainly doesn’t make someone a great online marketer.

It’s frustrating having the same conversation time after time with clients or potential clients. “Why do you charge so much? My brother/ son-in-law/cousin/grand-niece/buddy’s kid can do it for free!”  My response? “Okay.” Creating a website isn’t that difficult and in truth,  almost anyone can do it. But more and more, your website is the “first impression” of your business that most of your customers will receive. Do you want just anyone to create that…and for free?

Today if you are in business, you have to be on the web. I used to tell people that if they couldn’t afford a professionally designed website that something, perhaps designed by their nephew, was better than nothing. Well, I’ve seen too many of those “somethings” and they bring about expressions: “that sure is something…,” “something in there has to make sense,” “I bet they had something else in mind.” A bad website can destroy your credibility. If you can’t afford a website, claim your business address in Google Places and other directories and add a short informative description. That is better than nothing and won’t leave potential customers wondering if the typos on your site are indicative of your lack of competence.

Now sometimes “the nephew” does get it right and the website looks great. But, there’s often another side to the story. It’s the inevitable follow up a year or two down the line. The business owner explains that online marketing “doesn’t work” for their business model. They didn’t get any leads through their website, the site is too difficult to update, or some other thing. The logic here is faulty. It’s no different than the 65 year old web Luddite who claims the “Internet is broken” because they can’t figure out how to buy a book from Amazon.

Successfully marketing a product or service online isn’t easy. While a “free” website may look great, it may not:

• Capture your unique selling proposition
• Include calls-to-action, telling visitors what to do next
• Organize information about your business in a logical, easy-to-digest manner
• Do one of a hundred other little things that make a website “sell” your business

And it’s definitely not going to be part of an overall strategy for marketing your business online. It’s the years of experience, testing, understanding of best practices for website design, online marketing, email marketing and now social media marketing that my team and I bring to the table. That’s why we cost more than your nephew, or cousin, or brother-in-law.

The Internet – Where anyone with a keyboard is an expert. However not all experts are created equal.

Twenty years ago, a simple document proposed a unified way for computers in a network to display information in a human readable way. It allowed you to easily move from one piece of information to another by simply moving your mouse over a piece of text and clicking it. This simple document, was the precursor to what we know today – hyper links and the World Wide Web. That document, published November 12^th 1990, can be found here.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – The Inventor of the Web

As a physicist working at CERN, he found that information was hard to access. In the mid 80s, the Internet existed solely as a large network of computers with CERN being one of the largest nodes in Europe. Even though computers using Internet Protocol were able to talk to each other, displaying the information to users was a problem. Reading one piece of information and then moving onto another was difficult.

HyperText and the World Wide Web

Information was structured in a hierarchy. If you wanted to see a paper written by Dr. Joe, you need to figure out which database that paper was stored in. You then needed type in commands and credentials to view it, typically in raw text. Let’s say that Joe referenced a report that his colleague John wrote and it was stored in another database. In order to access this report, you’d then need to connect to that database, type in some commands to find the paper and then it might show it to you using another program. The Internet facilitated the sharing of information but you can see from this example that there was no unified way to show it to you.

Berner-Lee’s document proposed a unified way to show information to the user and a way for users to reference other information easily. Information did not need to rely on a hierarchy anymore. All information could “link” to other information and to each other and there was finally a unified way for computers to show this information. This invention, combined with domain name registration and TCP/IP (both being emergent technologies in the 80s) gave birth to the World Wide Web as we know it.

It’s free

In my opinion, the most important line of this proposal is this: “to provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone.” Lee was working at CERN and therefore, all intellectual property developed there belonged to CERN. This included the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTML and the browser developed by Lee. If CERN and Lee followed conventional software development wisdom, they would have charged royalties for any institution or individuals using it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams but insisted that his work by released into the public domain. This is huge. By doing this, new industries were created.

If it weren’t for this document (and its eventual implementation), companies like Google, YouTube and Facebook would never have been created. Blogs like mashable.com, gawker.com, smashingmagazine.com and your favourite site featuring pictures of cats would never have been possible.

A few notes

Technically speaking, Lee drafted his first memo on Hypertext in March of 1989. His boss wrote “vague but exciting…” on this draft but didn’t let him follow through with his idea. It wasn’t until Robert Cailliau, rewrote and submitted the draft in November 12^th 1990 that they were able to receive approval and funds to actually start the project.

This September, Amalgam Design earned the honour of redesigning the homepage for World Vision Canada’s website. World Vision Canada is one of Canada’s largest charities with annual revenues in excess of $300M. More than half a million children are sponsored by Canadians through this amazing organization.

The challenge of the redesign was to maintain the focus the website’s primary goal, driving child sponsorship, while providing visitors easy access to World Vision Canada’s other marketing and advocacy programs.

“Our team worked with World Vision to define the goals of the site and strategize what content should be included and what shouldn’t and how their audience would be best served,” explains our Digital Demigod, Adam Hadley.

Design Ninja Sandra Smith adds, “We wanted to strongly brand them and the blue is one of their secondary corporate colours that doesn’t get alot of airtime. We wanted to use the easily recognized World Vision orange but we didn’t want the whole site to be saturated with it. The emphasis had to be on the children that are being helped through the organization.”

We wanted to add more dimension to the site and made the content boxes rounded and added a drop shadow to them. The menu hovers include more shading to refine the shape. We added web fonts, a reasonably new technology that really makes websites pop by not being restricted to standard system fonts.  We put the design on a standard grid to streamline the look. Lastly, we added a Twitter feed to support World Vision Canada’s social media efforts.

Earlier this year, World Vision Canada began working with Amalgam Design to produce the digital version of Childview, a quarterly magazine which is the flagship communication to child sponsors and donors. Amalgam Design also developed a social media strategy for them that has helped to increase World Vision Canada’s Facebook fans by 48% and their Twitter followers by an astounding 369% in just 6 months. Subsequent editions of Childview have followed and later this week we’ll be launching another major online project. Click here to view the new World Vision Canada homepage.

More and more, Canadian charities are trusting Amalgam Design to drive their brand and achieve their online goals. We have extensive experience with fundraising microsites, SEO, social media, email campaigns and virtual catalogs. With over 40 years of combined digital marketing experience, Amalgam Design is your online superhero! Read more about our digital services for charities. If you’re ready to find out how Amalgam Design can help you achieve our online fundraising and advocacy goals click here to contact us.

You are an organization, seeking to build a site that any of your non-tech savvy employees can update regularly. You want a quick turn around – it has to be up and running fairly quickly. Oh, and you don’t have much of a budget. So, after Googling about, you find out that you’ll want an open source Content Management System. Excellent! Problem solved!

Wait, what is it?

I like to explain what a Content Management System does by comparing it to what we’re all used to: MS Word. You open up a document and type. You can add pictures, tables and formatting. You can save documents anywhere on your computer. You can send documents to others to edit.

A typical Content Management System allows you to update content without knowing HTML. It allows you to post the content up to your site without having an FTP client. Your employees can take that content (depending on their user permissions) and edit it. You can tell where you want the content to be displayed: on the home page, on part of the home page, on its own page etc.

And, there are many free CMSs to choose from: the big three I’ve had experience with are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!.

Great! Now, get one and go do it.

Not so fast! Content Management Systems can be a big headache. They may not always do what you want and they all have a learning curve. There is no perfect CMS. Each one has its own strengths and its weaknesses. Below, I highlight what each system is the best and worst at.

WordPress

Best: First and foremost, it is a blogging platform. You write an article, and it gets added to the front page of other articles and sorted in reverse chronological. You can tag and categorize articles. Finally, WordPress allows (and encourages) comments on your articles.

Worst: It was made to be a blogging system so making it act like something else, say, an e-commerce site isn’t its best use. Though it is possible, with the proper plugins, it will take a lot more time to develop.

Joomla!

Best: Joomla! is perfect for setting up a company site. You write the article, and tell Joomla! where to show it. This is a good system if you want your employees to make quick updates in the “news” section, but have every other part of the site remaining static.

Worst: The backend (where you log in) has quite a bit of a learning curve. So you’ll find that you’ll spend an hour or two getting to know how it works. Also, it is not a community-based system like WordPress. It is meant for you to post stuff up quickly in order to update your visitors.

Drupal

Best: Amazing community building system. Use this if you:

• have a lot of employees that want to blog
• if you have some news sections that need to be updated frequently
• if you’re a school portal and you need your students to log in for whatever reason etc etc

Worst: Though it is the most customizable system, it takes the most time to develop. You may even need to hire a dedicated PHP developer to get your site up and going. Its backend system, by far, has the steepest learning curve. What took you a couple of hours to learn Joomla!, will take you days to learn Drupal’s backend.