There is an increasing trend with new web projects: organizations launching self-managed websites, on platforms typically consisting of basic, free or low cost content management systems. This practice is fine, and fully embraced by our firm, Montauk Marketing & Design, however there are some distinct issues that we see time and time again.
Got template?
These newfangled sites come with a low price tag (hopefully), and heavily leverage templates as the basis for the design and layout, incorporating a lot of third party plug-ins. Again, this is fine except for the fact that many service providers bill such sites as "custom" when they are anything but; though they may be customizable to an extent, too many sites look the same. The high level of flexibility of the best of them is impressive, yet it still falls short of the pixel-perfect, correctly coded and optimized custom design.
We are also seeing more and more business and organization websites being published as blogs. The layman may not spot the difference, but it is easy to see if you know what to look for. Content is posted in chronological order, from newest to oldest, rather than the customary form of easily navigable pages. To all companies with corporate sites running as blogs: Good luck getting your arms around your SEO. And don't forget to continuously read all those posts for any information that should be end-of-lifed. Oh, and one more thing; seriously consider consolidating your content into clear, concise and navigable pages. Most people don't want to wade through pages of posts to discover more about you and your business offerings.
When considering between going with a template based design or one that is custom, the customer should also ask their web design firm about their experience in all aspects of designing an SEO friendly website.
Case in point: We recently engaged with a client who had seemingly done everything the "right way" in building his web presence, dating back 14 years! I highly respect the CEO's approach of being ahead of the curve, but that particular website was a tangled mess of templates and sloppy code. Not only that, but the designer's SEO efforts had a ruinous effect on their search ranking. The problems are too many to list here but there were far too many keywords, content that was delivered in a way that it would not be seen by the search engines, and the website copy was way out of sync with the business.
The truth is, Montauk Marketing & Design offers both approaches to our clients. We place importance on communicating the different ramifications each approach has. But in the end, blogs are blogs. They are great in support of a business mission but not necessarily as main information delivery mechanism. And the template approach is best for low-budget, introductory websites, as long as your web developer can customize the work to suit your needs, and can demonstrate a history of strong SEO results for their template-based work.
