Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Expand Your Web Site By Using a Content Management System

Craig McGuire of PR Week recently wrote an article titled “Expanding Web sites helps readership.” McGuire found that updating Web sites to offer easier and effective tools brings in a broader audience and I couldn’t agree more.

McGuire used FedEx’s Online Newsroom as an example of how an organization can take regular press release, news and company background content and turn it into an interactive, Web 2.0 hub for all Web site users from the press to shareholders. FedEx used a permission-based content management system to apply such effective and descriptive tools as videos, images, social bookmarking, multimedia flash video and many more. FedEx went from having 4,500 unique visitors per month to 65,000 per month.

The Furia Rubel site is also built on a content management system foundation and we completely stand by McGuire’s analysis. Your company’s Web site is your store front or as quoted in this article, “one centralized, 24-hour official company online newsroom.” You want your store front to look good and feel clean, offer the most recent and desired goods and entice customers to keep coming back. McGuire lists some key Web site guidelines that may help you expand your Web site.

Do
- Track audience interest and allow feedback
- Lean toward simple, clean navigation
- Offer a means to subscribe to news

Don’t
- Follow the herd
- Produce a variety of Web sites
- Let your content grow stale – timely content is vital

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post Leah! Updating your site's content frequently is indeed crucial, not only to keep visitors interested, but also to increase your site's search ranking. The more often new content is published to a site, the more search engine "spiders" crawl and index the content. This translates into more people finding your site when they're searching keywords in Google. There are some great open source content management systems if you don't want to pay for a pricey proprietary CMS license, and the ones I recommend most are WordPress and Drupal.

EstateSettlementGuy said...

Probate Market Idea Niche
One of the things I have noticed in law firm advertising is the growth of niche marketing. I find this area of marketing interesting because in some regards the small guy can provide more ROI results that the Goliath's (Lawyers.com).

I recently asked the Martindale rep. "how many attorneys do you have in your directory?... he proudly stated, "over a million" to which I replied "well then I guess the odds of a client finding me are about one in a million". He didn't know what to say...
That is when I decided to look elsewhere. My practice area is probate law and I found a niche site a niche probate marketing site. The site offers exclusive directory listings by county.

I am the only attorney in the directory for my market of over 500,000 people. They have over 150 pages of probate content (a good niche) to help drive quality traffic.

The site I found, site ranks high in search engines and seems to even do the pay per click (now I don’t have too). Because, I see them at the top on all the probate keywords.
Thought you should know about it...
Tom