Internet Tech Boston

I saw this great website today that wasn’t even a website. Instead of creating the standard company website that we’ve all grown to know and love, the agency BooneOakley created their entire website out of a series of connected YouTube videos. Check it out:

This is a pretty ingenious idea that’s more than just an agency gimmick. With over 78 million unique visitors in June of 09, YouTube gets a ton of traffic. There’s plenty of eyeballs there. The content stands on it’s own, but being video you also get the added benefit of not just sight, but sound and motion too.

I’ve seen other approaches like this. Boston area agency Modernista once redesigned their entire website to be a series of Delicious links. Now’s it a collection of links to content sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and social media sites like Facebook. A small frame-like overlay instructs you:

Do not be alarmed.
You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web.
The menu on the left is our homepage. The blog is ours. Everything else is beyond our control.

At the end of the day, people are visiting your company or product website to get information – pure and simple. Who says your company or product website needs to be hand-crafted, self-hosted, unique combination of art, utility, and technology? As digital marketers, we should be focused, instead, on creating the content that visitors find useful and create conversion paths that engage visitors and get them to raise their hand in interest.

Tell me what YOU think. Leave a comment below – will the traditional online home evolve into a situation where there are no more websites – just content?

Website Redesign projects can be large, time-consuming, and expensive. From the beginning phases of selecting the right agency to partner with, to creating compelling user-interface designs, to the implementation of Content Management Systems and other back-end functionality – a complete and professionally built web site will be a time consuming endeavor. Applying the old adage that “you get what you pay for,” your investment in time, money, and resources should pay off in a strong online brand that generates inbound traffic and leads, accomplishes your defined set of activity objectives and provides measure ROI.

When working on a redesign of an existing website, don’t fall into the trap of “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” Your old website has some value – especially if it has been in existence for some time. The major search engines have indexed your site and assigned specific page rank to each of them. When companies completely overhaul their websites as part of a redesign, this typically entails reordering pages and otherwise changing the web address of pages. When Google revisits your site after the launch of your redesigned pages, it won’t find the pages it had previously ranked. If you don’t leave explicit instructions to the Google on where that page has been moved to, Google will simply delete that page out of its index.

You don’t want to lose your old page ranks when your new site launches. To prevent this from happening, create an address list of all old pages and their new page addresses. Implement this list into your web server as a 301 Redirect list. A 301 Redirect is an instruction given to the search engine indicating that the web page address it has in its index has been permanently moved to a new address. A 301 Redirect will cause the Search Engine to update its index to the new location, and will help ensure that all the effort spent on Search Engine Optimization, link building, and content creation from your old site, is transferred to your new site.

I recently discovered BrowserShots.org and it has improved the quality of life of QA Engineers at Embarc greatly. Simply put:

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Working at an Interactive Agency as long as I have, I’ve seen how the Quality Assurance team has been required to maintain a small farm of desktop machines running all the most common browser versions. Switching from machine to machine to validate a properly formatted web page takes time. Trust me. This free service has automated a very manual process. Thanks Johann!