Our latest webinar, “Finding and Choosing Professionals on the Web,” is now available in segments on YouTube.

Gather the facts behind executive-level usage of the Internet as a tool to find information and inform choices about professional services providers. This seminar presents Greenfield/Belser’s and The Brand Research Company’s recently completed findings drawn from an online survey of executive-level buyers of accounting, consulting and legal services across the U.S. It covers how, where and what they search for online as they consider firms like yours.

Burkey Belser and Sue Stock Allison shared these primary research results and insights about how to adapt your website and digital strategies to align with buyer habits.

Join us this Wednesday at 2 p.m. EST for the next webinar in our three part series, “Designing the Interactive Experience.” Reserve your webinar seat at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/927177267

Join us for our next FREE Webinar, rescheduled due to inclement weather in the Washington area:

Finding and Choosing Professionals on the Web
(Professional services buyers speak again)

Wednesday, February 17; 2:00–3:00 PM EST

Gather the facts behind executive-level usage of the Internet as a tool to find information and inform choices about professional services providers. This seminar presents Greenfield/Belser’s and The Brand Research Company’s recently completed findings drawn from an online survey of executive-level buyers of accounting, consulting and legal services across the U.S. It covers how, where and what they search for online as they consider firms like yours.

Join Burkey Belser and Sue Stock Allison on February 17th at 2 PM as they share these primary research results and insights about how to adapt your Web site and digital strategies to align with buyer habits. All delivered in a 60-minute Webinar on your own desktop.

You will learn that executive-level buyers are online in droves and…

• Why search engines are critical and which keywords they target
• How online behavior has changed offline habits in the past five years
• Which Internet sources are considered the most important in their searches
• Why the quality of your Web site is critical
• The path buyers take when they reach your site
• How they are using social media, blogs, video and your e-communications
• And more critical information about your buyers online.

Register Now! Reserve your Webinar seat at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/586345346

The World Wide Web is a vast universe, proliferated with Web sites, social networks and interactive media. All of them are created with one goal in mind: to deliver information. And by “information”, I don’t mean long narratives or factual data. Whether it’s in the form of video, a Facebook profile or an interactive portfolio, anything that’s intended to communicate something—even if it’s a simple feeling—is information. In fact, because information is a very misleading term, the interactive community prefers to call it “content.” A List Apart goes even further by defining an actual strategy for Web content.

The Marriage of Substance and Style

All too often, content is offered up as pure aesthetics—or else it’s dumped on a page in a series of uniform, uninteresting paragraphs. Consequently, Web sites that engage both our emotion, and intellect are rare. It’s similar to dating. One might have curves in all the right places but not personality, while another might be smart and ugly. Either way you find yourself wanting more.

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Follow up to “What’s Your Takeaway?“

Is your core message is invisible?
Doesn’t really matter whether it’s an ad or a Web site or a spread from a brochure. We can be on message, but the message is lost in a headline that competes with other copy or other visuals or a fractured layout. The result? Visual confusion. No takeaway. By the way, we can do this with illustration as well. You don’t need someone to art direct anything, frankly. Just look at the photograph or illustration and ask, “Do I get it immediately?” Even three seconds is too long. If you answer that question, then you can quickly clean up the details – choose better colors, improve the typography, etc. Consider a notorious client response, “Make the logo bigger.” Because for them, that’s a key takeaway!

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Ok, I finally have my Web site built. Great! I also have a name in mind for it. Oops! Too late. All the words in the dictionary were taken by 1996. Most common phrases were taken shortly after that. The most exotic word combinations are long gone as of this date. So, how do I come up with a good domain name that will help to get my Web site major traffic for those who care about what I have to sell? Christopher Johnson tackles this question in his article posted to Smashing Magazine, “The Effective Strategy for Choosing Right Domain Names.”

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