LancetCard: Meet your new Web Guy

Your site may look great in Internet Explorer 7, but how does it look in Firefox or Safari for example? Often times sites will loose their formatting and look unfinished, or just bad! If visitors using these alternative browsers land on your site and can’t clearly view the contents, they’re going to go elsewhere – and you’ll never know you lost them.

You can download most of the popular browsers for free, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, AOL and take a look at your site. If you don’t have a Mac, find friends or colleagues and ask them to take a look. If you find problems, change the code. Testing your site in multiple browsers will ensure that your visitors will see your site the way you intended them to.

That is the question. Many businesses are divided in their ideas about e-mail marketing. We all know how we feel on the receiving end; most e-marketing efforts that even make it to your inbox end up un-read and straight in the trash. The most common mistakes people make are unclear subject titles, overwhelming amounts of text and no clear call to action. All the same rules of website design apply to e-marketing; it should be user friendly and straight to the point. There are many services that offer easy, do-it-yourself e-marketing solutions. If you’re looking for the best results and high receipt rates, having a custom designed web based e-mailer is the way to go. The truth about e-marketing is that if you’re not doing it effectively you’re just spamming.

Lancet can help! With our web design expertise and technical knowledge, we can design a custom e-mailer that will help you reach your consumers and become a powerful marketing tool. Contact us for more details.

No one likes dealing with a faceless company or feeling like they’re conversing with a robot. The Web is a very personal, one-on-one medium, take advantage of the opportunity you have to connect with your audience. Your site’s style and approach should create the feeling that its message is coming from a real human being. Turn up the warmth by offering opportunities to contact you, reveal names. If your company is small, add biographies and photos of your staff. Do you have a “Feedback” page on your website? Ask for feedback, and when people provide it, thank them. Websites are more successful with a human touch!

Corporate-Speak is marketing jargon that has two large flaws — it doesn’t focus on the customer’s needs and it sounds too formal. It’s usually full of buzzwords, too, which have long ago lost their punch. Here’s an example of the kind of corporate-speak that’s rampant on home pages:

“At Acme Company, we endeavor to become a leading contributor to a more sustainable world. Our corporate citizenship focuses on who we are as an industry leader, the solutions we offer in the marketplace, and how we conduct our customer-centered business. We aspire to be one of the most respected and robust companies in the world.”

Notice the heavy use of “we”? This writing is just plain boring — and worse — the message is lost.

You must accurately profile your target customers and anticipate their concerns. Most likely, they’re already cynical of corporate jargon, so it’s more effective to speak to them in less formal, more concrete terms. Like this:

“At Acme Company, every employee receives a full day of training on our Sustainable Earth policies. This isn’t just paying lip service to sustainability – it’s a big part of our corporate conscience. We’re aware of the impact we have on the planet, and this awareness shapes how we do business in hundreds of small communities where people’s lives depend on the quality of their soil, water and air.”

In sum: Get Real. Speak directly to the readers’ concerns and be specific.

In the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you either play by the rules (white-hat) or you try to cheat the system (black-hat). It’s not often that a major corporation is caught wearing a black hat, but today we learned that BMW violated Google guidelines and will be blacklisted. The site that got nabbed was BMW’s German website www.bmw.de.

BMW ran afoul of Google by creating “doorway” pages of text that repeated keywords like “neuwagen” (“new car” in German) in order to trick Google crawlers. If actual users landed on a doorway page, they would be redirected properly and remain unaware of the trickery. But the crawlers would read the doorway page and unknowingly score it highly, thus giving an unfair boost to BMW.