Charles Willcock
Many ideas which are put forward as best practice for website design, if you step back and look at traditional print – it is not hard to see where those ideas have come from. Having a picture of the author of a blog is one such “best practice” idea. Clearly this is not new, many articles in newspapers and magazines have carried a picture of the author.
This can come as a shock when you see the person in real life and realise they have been using the same photo for more than 20-years. I have been involved with websites since 1997, taking an active role in the printing company website I worked at back in the 1990s. It was obvious that the internet was going to become the dominant form of communication back in the 1990s hence I left.
Today I build websites for SMEs who value having a single point of contact – where you do not have to explain what you want multiple times. In addition to building the website I can help promote them in Google Ads. This works well as you learn snippets of information from the Google Ads which can be fed back in to the website, to further improve the chances of coming up in organic searches.
Expertise
Google Ads
I started using Google Ads to promote clients websites back in 2004 and since then have taken an active interest in its development. Google has made the product more and more complicated over the years, and then brings out new products to try and make it less complicated. I do not think people who write computer code necessarily make the best product designers.
From Desktop To Mobile
That has not been a huge surprise however I never thought that that most websites would get more than 50% of their traffic via a mobile phone. That has been a surprise but as the internet is most places thanks to mobile broadband maybe not. (Tablets are not used much to access websites.)
Everyone Is A Website Expert
One client decided they would bring their website in-house, and it went form 60 pages to 11. They also stopped the Google Ads which I had run for many years. Next they went through a very quiet patch costing a lot of money. Who could imagine that? Turns out there is a lot more to been found in Google than people realise.
Looks Alone Are Not Sufficient
A great looking website can still lack the key ingredients Google uses to rank websites, again most websites owners are totally unaware of such factors.
Trust
I am pleased to report my longest standing customer goes back 19-years, he is 78, and I am pretty sure he is going to retire in the near future. I have another client who has a website and I first did business with him before my son who is 33 was born. Many of my clients have been with me for more than 10-years.
What Keeps Digital Marketing Interesting?
Digital marketing is constantly evolving, every time I have thought where now? Something new comes around the corner. AI will transform the world but just as those who had hand looms 220 years ago thought that the world was about to end when factories came along I am sure that AI will just make people more productive not redundant.
Every Generation Thinks The Latest Technology Is Going To End The World Of Work
Water and Wind powered production. Then steam powered factories. Canals were key to transport. Then railways. Electricity Telephones. Cars replaced horses. Electric cars were replaced by cars with a starter motor and a petrol engine. Planes replaced ships for people transport. Colour printing becomes cheap and direct marketing ramps up. Computers become cheaper and every office starts to have one then every home. The internet goes from 28kbps per second (glacial for younger people to 33kbps). Mobile phones become powerful computers / cameras. The internet is fast and everywhere.
AI is simply going to make people more productive.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
I first become interested in SEO back in 1997 whilst working for a Leeds printing company. Sadly they did not make it through the transition of the marketing world from mainly on paper to predominantly digital. Too interested in dots on paper and not dots on screens. Today with more than 27-years direct experience of SEO for me this is not an add-on at the end of a project but the foundation stones of the project. Something which makes me a bit of an outlier in the world of building websites.