Site Functionality and Marketing Strategy

Your web site navigation, your graphical design, and your directory/article structure should be determined by what it is you are trying to market. If you are marketing dog whistles then your site's category headers, links, images, flash, etc. should all be centered around dog whistles. If you are marketing yourself then the same is true. If you are marketing real estate for your area it should be obvious to the user what point you are getting across.

Your site should function around your marketing focus. Your main topics should be easy to get to and topics that relate but are not the focus of the site should be harder to get to because they are buried slightly.

Use primary navigation (top or left side) for main category or article navigation. Use secondary (right side, bottom) for less important topics. You may even consider linking to less important pages from pages other than your home page so that the primary articles stand out both to search engines and users.

Use images and logos to get your primary message across. If you have cool images for your secondary articles then put them on the appropriate pages. A real estate web site with a picture of dogs on the front page may detract from your message. The dogs should go on the "about me" or "about my dogs" page. If you do have an "about my dogs" page don't link to it from the home page. Link to it from your "about me" page. Even though we love our dogs and want our users to love our dogs we are not marketing the dogs. On the "about me" page we are marketing ourselves and our dogs are related to us so we can link to them, as a secondary piece of info. If our users want to see if we like dogs or not they will seek out that info. Our home page should focus on our primary marketing purpose.

As an exercise it is a good idea to sit back and look at the message your site is presenting. If we market it correctly Google will like it better, our users will like it better, and we will convert more clients.