The AWS Blog

I spend a fair amount of time talking with small and medium sized business owners about their web marketing. Often times these individuals aren’t ready to shoulder the costs associated with true goal-oriented web design, SEO, or PPC, so the conversation turns to, “what can I be doing in the meantime?”

Aside from blogging, posting on forums, and keeping their site content fresh, I always talk about online PR. Most of the time the people I’m conversing with have no idea that you can freely or cheaply distribute press releases online.

Writing a press release and then pushing it out to the various distribution services is a great way to get the word out about recent newsworthy happenings at your organization, and also an effective method of getting inbound links for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization. Some of these sites will also distribute the releases to news syndication services such a Google News and Yahoo! News.

If you’re confident in your writing ability, read over a few press releases that have been released in your industry to get a feel for the format and the writing style and give it a whirl (I wrote the majority of the press releases in the early days of Awecomm - how hard can it be!). If not, go out and hire a freelance writer. There are a lot of good ones out there that don’t charge all that much.

Like many things in business and search engine optimization, this isn’t the holy grail; it’s just one more thing that can attract website visitors and potential customers, and one more thing that you should be doing. Also, there’s really no substitution for a good Public Relations firm if you’re at the point that you can afford it. Until then, get writing, and use the list below!

Free Press Release Distribution Websites
- PR Leap
- I-Newswire
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log

Paid Press Release Distribution Websites
- PR Web
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Newswire
- Business Wire

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When you use a Flash movie as the primary element of a website (including the site’s navigation, etc), your visitors expect it to behave like a website, not a Flash movie.

I’m a Seinfeld nut, and I’m also a big fan of those “HP Hand Commercials” that show you what celebrities are doing on their computers. I recently heard that Jerry Seinfeld had done one, and wanted to go online to check it out. I Googled “HP Seinfeld” and went to the site.

Besides wanting to watch the spot, I wasn’t sure what I was there for, so I started clicking around in the primary navigation. Every time I hit the back button to return to the main page of the micro site, I was taken back to Google; so much for a good user experience. I finally made my way down the primary nav to “Watch Jerry’s TV Spot” and then left the site.

Here’s the important part. In this instance HP overcame this usability flaw for a number of reasons (I was determined to see the spot, and I knew that the HP site was the best place to view it, so I was willing to put up with the flaws). What if you’re the small/medium sized e-business competing for people’s attention online? You’re not going to have that luxury, and chances are you’re not going to overcome a usability shortcoming such as this one.

Making the back button work in Flash is typically not a difficult thing to do. Google something like “back button flash” and you’ll find article after article on different approaches.

P.S. (11/7/2007): I’ve been looking through my analytic data, and realized that I’m starting to get search traffic from words like “back button flash” (duh), so I thought that the responsible thing to do would be to add a few useful links.

- ActionScript.org | Enabling a Back Button within Flash
- Cool Demo and Source Code from RobertPenner.com

If you’re one of the people that came here to actually learn how to do it, instead of just listen to me rant about unusable web design, the links above are some of the best resources that I’ve found.

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The Troy Chamber of Commerce held their annual eHelen Awards for Web Design last week, and Awecomm was fortunate enough to win the Business Services category with our MeetDeepDiscovery.com website.

The panel of judges was made up of a number of highly respected individuals from the design, business, and technology fields, and it was a great honor to be recognized by them! It was also great to hear their comments, along the lines of, “it’s very easy to understand the service that they are providing, and the site is clean-cut and easy to navigate.” After all, that’s really what the Deep Discovery process is all about.

Everyone at the event had the privilege of listening to ePrize CEO Josh Linkner speak about corporate culture and innovation. ePrize is a client of ours, so I’ve heard Josh speak on the topic a number of times and I’m also exposed to their powerful culture regularly (anyone who was at the presentation and saw the “new ePrizer” with the e shaved into his chest realizes that it’s something to behold).

During his presentation Josh drove home a number of points about how stifling the typical top-down corporate culture can be, and establishes the idea that the only way to truly innovate and be remarkable is to empower people and let their creativity come out.

Now that’s a great concept, but I can feel you rolling your eyes as you start to think about applying it to your real-work projects. “Who knows what I’ll get back if I just let my team run wild with their own ideas.”

MeetDeepDiscovery.com is an example of the concept being applied in the real world.

Our now senior designer, Roxy, was relatively new to Awecomm when she and I met about the site for the first time. I showed her the draft of the architecture and the page wireframes (no graphics, just Visio outlines) and we talked about the Deep Discovery service and the goals of the site.

At that point, our Account Manager would typically talk about the creative input that we had received from the client. What their logo looks like, the style, layout and colors in their marketing material, and the ideas that they had given us for the site.

For this project (and every project since), I chose to give Roxy complete creative control. I told her that this was an internal project (not for a client), and that the service would have its own brand, so she didn’t have to adhere to AWS colors/styles. She could literally do whatever she wanted with the site.

We talked for a while longer and joked about how over the past few years black had become such a taboo in the corporate design world as a background color. We decided to do the site on a black background, to show that it could be done clean and professionally. That was the last conversation we had about the creative elements of the site. All I knew was that it was going to be black, and that she was going to run with it.

Later that night I got a text message from Roxy along the lines of, “I was just driving, and my head started to fill with so many cool ideas of things I can do against a black background that I had to pull my car over!!”

I think that Josh would agree, that is passion.

I’m pretty positive that the website would have turned out fine had I told her what colors I wanted, what kind of layout and style to use, and what feel to give the site. It would have properly articulated our marketing message, and accomplished our goals.

But would it have turned out to be a remarkable, award-winning website? I don’t think so.

You might still be rolling your eyes. Relinquishing control isn’t an easy thing to do, especially if your personality is like mine. But when you do, and when it works and results in creativity, innovation, and passion, there’s no greater feeling.

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