In the past, when clients asked us to build a website, we would take a fairly traditional approach: Define the audience(s), define the message(s), differentiate and then publish. Over the last couple of years, with the help of early interactive marketing guru Teresa Caro, we’d add some keywords and think about page texts and tags. Now it’s clear: when a company creates a website, or adds to a pre-existing one, it has to consider its entire web brand. A website has become a web brand journey, if you will, not just a stop on the brand train.
Now, the creation of a new website includes all of the steps we USED to take in a full branding exercise. Complete creative brief. Competitive analysis. More analysis on web search and competitive search positioning. Even more analysis on past site analytics, user profiles, patterns, expectations. If a client is considering employing us for search management—and there is no time like site construction to do it—the pre-work is even more complex. And, if we’re considering customer communications, lead generation, social media and PR objectives, we take an even broader sweep through the foundation development step. Even more reasons to have a marketing firm, not a web services company, manage your website project. Because you wouldn’t have a web services company manage your brand, right?
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