Published in Marketing on Friday, May 21st, 2004
A little rant about marketing on the internet, why we need it, and some good links and examples about it.
There's been a lot of talk on the internet about the different skills web developers need to survive in today's web services marketplace. Truth be told, the required skillset largely depends on the services that you or your company offer.
Regardless, as the web matures, more and more companies are looking for more than just a website, they are looking for a marketing solution.
The internet is, after all, a marketplace, and success is there for those who can capitalize. And there is still plenty of room for successful online marketing. From Working Wonders on the Web, Inc.com:
Of companies with fewer than 100 employees, only 40% have websites, and just 40% of those do e-commerce, according to Merle Sandler, a senior analyst at IDC, in Framingham, Mass. Far fewer manage other major functions online. "They still see it as being too expensive," says Sandler.
And I don't care what anyone says, building a website that helps a company successfully market and sell it's product or service is sexy!
In Marketing 101 - The Essentials of Marketing, Ammon Johns, internet marketing consultant extraordinaire, covers some of the basic ideas of marketing and what it entails. The ideas that he presents in this, one of several articles on Searchengineblog.com, are things that a web designer may want to keep in mind when laying out and developing a website.
Working Wonders on the Web, from Inc.com, looks at three different companies that are making it happen on the web. The third company, MagicTricks.com, is a great example of a small business getting it right (though I'll not say anything about the site itself - numbers are spekaing for it!).
Marketing isn't for everyone, but as web designers we need to be aware of marketing and accept that it is another one of the players in the list of weights and balances that affect many of our design decisions. In fact, typical user testing and just plain user awareness could essentially be thought of as subsets of good marketing.
To close, a couple of examples from designers we may all be familiar with, both of them working a layer of marketing in with all of the other layers that we have to be aware of these days.
For starters, Dave Shea's new website, brightcreative.com. I wonder how many people were surprised to see him use Flash? Read through the site and see how he markets himself, the garden and it's success.
Another group of sites
undergoing a marketing massage at the moment is Paul Scrivens' 9rules network sites. Paul talks about tradoffs in the post - Working on branding all the sites across the 9rules Network... This includes making Arial the default font across all sites (yeah, yeah, I know)
- and the topic comes up again later in the comments.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
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