Okay, let me start off by saying I adore hubspot and use their tools and refer them to clients. I think they are waaaaayyy smart. I downloaded a guide to redesigning a web site, great information, good things and tips in it…I’m all about making people develop and add to their site content so what they said was really clicking with me.

Till I got to this statement:

<<There is a great article from Seth Godin about this.  He says  I’m going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’s one that you can start with?  …Your car isn t unique, and your house might not be either.   I agree.  Most people care about the content more than the design.  The design should be good, but that does not mean unique and expensive. >>

What, they live in shacks and drive Yugos?

Good design is about engaging people. No one ever went to a site with tired, stale, outdated design and said, “Gosh I want to read all that content” Ask your wife if looks matter, she will tell you.

no, I think this is a gender gap in marketing approach and you have to have balance. Good content -and- fresh design. You cannot undervalue original custom design. In terms of usability, in terms of presence. People form opinions about you from your appearance… that isn’t verbal. It applies to web sites as much as to humans. A List Apart Blog would not be what it is without the custom look. The New Yorker, USA Today in print, in retail…look at Target vs Walmart.

it matters much more than you think.

Guys, go read some
Wonderbranding and rethink it. peace.

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Okay, so a lot of people need a quick and inexpensive web site solution. One of the things I have done to meet the need is to offer template sites at a lower rate. You can get a template from a place like templatemonster.com.

But here is the thing, these are attractive, but they need work to make them effective. Using a template out of the box can be a bad idea. Here is a screen shot of a template I’m working on for a start up skin care company in NY. We developed the corporate ID and labels, this site is still in beta and there is only filler content on the beta, but I’m going to use this for illustration purposes. On this we’ve already done quite a bit of work, we’ve chopped off all of the flash site and made the flash piece into a splash page, inserted their logo, changed the links to go to html pages, the html pages are based on the template design but we have added a navigation bar and changed the content area from a tiny thin scrollbox to …well, actual pages. So all of the html pages are already re-designs. But that is only the beginning. There is still much wrong with this:

Flash intro - template that we purchased and are customizing

Using a splash page is terrible for SEO and annoying for a lot of people, so we need to make sure to get around that. Our solution will be to actually layer the splash page on top of the home page with a lightbox-type method so that there seem to be two pages but there is actually one. Search engines will see all the content on the home page (right now there isn’t much), but this is not black hat, it is perfectly acceptable. We also need to add -skip flash- buttons and an automatic redirect for people with Flash disabled. Phones need to go straight to the html page. There needs to be social networking “follow” links up front and on each page, as well as contact information on each page.

On the content side, the facts right now are woefully thin of course. We need testimonials, clinical information, detailed product information, links to studies and of course we’re adding e-commerce. So the FAQ and Products page designs will have to change dramatically, more than they already have, in order to accommodate more content. We need professional product shots, the contact form needs to be tweaked out, it should write to a database that the client can then import into her reporting tools or CRM. Auto-responders are essential.

Then we need to drive traffic to the site with targeted email blasts and a social media campaign. We’ll do promotions to create online buzz.

So while a template site can be a great starting point to get your needs met inexpensively, plan to either replace it completely if you use it as-is, or plan to do extensive modification to the site template so that it is effective for you.

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Do not call, do not email, stop trying, it doesn’t matter how big my workload gets, I will always, always, always use American labor.

I’ve heard from at least six of these companies in the last two weeks. You now have your official reply, the answer is no. Categorically, unequivocally, no. I love my country, I’m not greedy or lazy, I have worked hard to do what I am doing and I’m NOT sending it to you because you called me. If I need to outsource, then we have tons of unemployed people right here. I have read history books and I am not interested in contributing to further economic collapse in the US. Responsibility starts with each individual. Tim Ferris is wrong. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries. Go away.

Thank you.

< /end rant >

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