Websites vs. Web presences

In a discussion with an old colleague yesterday, I realized that she and I would advise a client looking to build a web presence for the first time completely differently.

She would go down a brand-marketing path: spend time selecting a good company name, carefully-design your unique selling proposition, write elegant marketing copy and integrate it into thoughtful layout, prune-down and focus your copy, being sure to get it all correct before going live.

I would advise them to do the opposite: publish small chunks of super useful information, now and often, making sure that search engines and social media services found them, relegate a traditional website to the 'nice-to-have' category and don't worry about integrated content and design since most of the content will be separated from design anyway.

My logic went like this: people don't enter websites from the top anymore, they enter them from the side. If you don't *already know* the name and pedigree of the organization, you Google keywords about them, or stumble over a post on someone's Facebook page or a blog you follow. If you had to pick, a 'high velocity' brand in the social media-sphere will get you more bang for your buck than a beautiful, elegant website.

Her point was that no one has time to read blogs, and that one's blog consumption level is directly related to the amount of spare time one has. Search engine optimization is all well and good, but without a professionally-designed website, anyone clicking through will dismiss you as not being legitimate. In fact, the organization should be discouraged about having high lead-to-client expectations - websites are required baselines for doing business in this day and age, and it doesn't pay to mess with them.

After debating the two approaches for a while, we concluded that both are valid, of course - in fact, should be part of a unified approach - but that one might be emphasized over another depending on the organization. In other words, established companies looking to expand their well-known brand within reasonably defined markets should emphasize brand marketing and websites; young brands without much of a following should concentrate on getting the word out there by travelling the engines and social media pathways.