Comments on: Ongoing role of a website manager

By: Andrew Young

Andrew Young — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:22:25 +0000

I found some online marketing classes on xTrain.com and was wondering if anyone else knows of any others that teach social media and interactive marketing.

By: Sally

Sally — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:14:47 +0000

Under the term "website manager" you mean webmaster, am I right? Because actually you describe webmaster's functions.

By: Simon Griffiths

Simon Griffiths — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:54:34 +0000

I agree with Toni's comments, and have to say that a company we work with in Italy has just had a new Joomla based site put together. This includes RSS feeds of all sorts of different things, news, products releases etc etc. The interesting bit is that they had ported over their last 5 news items from their previous website. There was one from 2007, but they stretched back to 2003! Site owners (and I am one) beware. I know there are lots of articles out there that say you must have a corporate blog as a marketing tool, but if you do it will take a considerable amount of time and effort to maintain. The question you should ask yourself is what are you going to put on there, how regularly and will it interest your customers anyway. For me most companies that I have been involved in do not have enough product launches or press releases to make a blog worth while. If you can get customer testimonials on specific application regularly, that would be the only thing I can image would be regularly read.

By: Toni

Toni — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:46:55 +0000

Hi
Great Post! I agree with you entirely, we often have clients ask for features such as updateable news, blogs etc and they don’t use them (or they give up after a few weeks). It takes an incredible amount of time to blog and keep your website content fresh. Competition on the web is fierce these days and you need to keep your customers coming back so making sure there is something new and interesting to read is a good start.
cheers
Toni
Professional web and graphic design in Bristol; Deckchair UK

By: ed89

ed89 — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:08:22 +0000

Good article. I actually wrote a slightly similar post a few weeks back after becoming so frustrated with clients coming back to me time and time again requesting me to do THEIR job!
If you buy a car, you don’t expect the dealer to fill it up every time you need gas!
…I’ve included the link below.

By: Simon Griffiths

Simon Griffiths — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:06:51 +0000

Great post, and I think it should be the subject of more discussion. A lot of the point you make are quite complex and can take a good while to get right.
I have been developing our site and tweaking it here and there for about 5 years now. The result is hopefully the most usable site amongst our competitors, but we are still learning something new every day. This can make the difference between your site working, and just not.
My personal tools of choice are analytics to look at overall trends and how we are going in general terms, Crazy Egg to look more closely at individual pages, and Clicktale to see in more detail if Crazy Egg is showing that there may be some confusion. It’s a lot to keep track of, but well worth the effort if your serious about your site.
As you also say don’t forget adwords. They can push traffic to your site you otherwise wouldn’t get. We finished a new site at the end of last year, based on best practise SEO principles. We waited and waited for it to start to raise up the rankings, and nothing. Since we have pushed adwords ads towards it, it is now generating enquiries, repeat visits, and as a result of the validity of its content, it is starting to finally climb up the ranking.
My only worry about this is that I am a bit of a geek, so am quite happy in HTML and CSS these days. For those of us in marketing that aren’t, site redesigns and navigational changes can be much more of an issue. For that reason I would say that Paul is right, the best way to work with our developer is to try to get some sort of an ongoing relationship where they say allow a few hours work every month for tweaks.