The Grossbauer Group blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is such an evocative hot-button today that some organizations are unsure why they worry about it. It’s like paying taxes: You’re just supposed to do it. Or are you?

Luxurious? Soothing? Relaxing? These marketing messages are hard to believe when rendered in a font most of us would reserve for one day of the year—Halloween. Yes, this one goes bump in my brain. When passing this sign recently with a friend, I heard the exclamation: “I would never let them TOUCH me!” Someone else said: “Pointy! Like knives.”

There’s a lot to consider in planning multilingual website development. Following are a few simple tips to guide the process and help ensure a usable website with easily accessible multilingual content.

• Never use the language name as a link to specific content.
• Create parallel sites with mirrored hierarchy.
• Offer toggling between languages.
• Avoid machine translation at all costs.
• Partner with an expert.

Keep reading for details on each of these multilingual website tips.

If you work in a school or nonprofit organization, you may believe that integrated marketing is out of reach. We hear it often: “I can’t do integrated marketing. We’re on a very tight budget.”

But integrated marketing isn’t really about budget. Yes, if you want to run ads and billboards—and don’t have free placement offers from your community—you may feel limited. However, you can still leverage the core elements of integrated marketing to promote school enrollment, student retention, staff recruitment, and positive community relationships.

Public perception is a key concern for PR leadership in many of the nation’s schools. Media coverage—from conventional news stories to social media—can bring on criticism, and sometimes even relate blatant misinformation. At the same time, a positive image of a school district among communities can promote enrollment and essential grassroots support. It can help schools achieve the ambitious goals laid out for public education.

For many executives, advertising is a comfortable, tangible way of demonstrating marketing at work. Inside the organization, it looks good. Sometimes it’s incredibly effective. Sometimes it’s an OOPS. Sometimes you can’t predict outcomes. But often, you can predict (and avoid) an OOPS.

What other [real estate/financial/education/chamber/non-profit/etc.] websites have you developed? This is one of the first questions clients often ask us before hiring us to design and develop a website. It makes perfect sense for a client to consider a web development agency’s familiarity with their industry. As it turns out, though, it’s not the most important measure of compatibility.

We hear a lot about search engine optimization (SEO)—getting traffic to your website. But what happens next? Will your targeted stakeholders take action?…like fill out a prospect form, or purchase a product, or download a file? If visitors do it, that’s a “conversion”.

Organizations seeking integrated marketing support sometimes ask: Are you in my industry? How many membership organizations (or schools or hospitals or consulting groups or food companies or construction companies or law offices) has your agency served with similar projects?

A content management system, or CMS, enables organizations to manage and update their website content in-house, without the need for technical skills. The CMS also serves as sort of a development platform that the web developer will build on (including creating functionality that may not “come with” the CMS).

If you’re thinking about choosing a CMS, here are a few questions to get you started.