The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 7th Edition

7The Content-Rich Website

If you’ve read from the beginning of the book, at this point you might be tempted to think that each of the media that innovative marketers use to reach buyers—blogs, podcasts, news releases, and all the rest—is a stand-alone communications vehicle. And while each certainly could be a self-contained unit (your blog does not need to link to your corporate site), most organizations integrate their online marketing efforts to help tell a unified story to buyers. Each medium is interrelated with all the others. Podcasts work with blogs. Twitter feeds point people to other company information. Multiple websites for different divisions or countries come together on a corporate site. No matter how you choose to deploy web content to reach your buyers, the place that brings everything together in a unified location is a content-rich website.

As anyone who has built a website knows, there is much more to think about than just the content. Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all important aspects of a good website. Unfortunately, in many organizations these other concerns dominate. Why is that? I think it’s easier to focus on a site’s design or technology than on its content. Also, there are fewer resources to help website creators with the content aspects of their sites—hey, that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book!

Often the only person allowed to work on the website is your organization’s technology expert, who in the early days was ...