Last Thursday I attended the Online Marketing Summit in downtown Seattle, and of all the marketing summits I’ve been to, I was quite impressed with this one. The line-up of speakers was credible and covered all areas of online marketers needs. I was drawn to this summit because one of our competitors was speaking (which always poses a great opportunity to learn what they’re up to), however this summit wasn’t about the vendors flaunting themselves. The Online Marketing Summit prides itself on being an educational day for attendees to learn how to be better ina variety of online marketing areas, and actually supports the audience to “boo” if a speaker starts talking too much about themselves or their company.
This summit came at a key time for me as we just launched our new website and are looking for any other tools to draw people to the site. One of the speakers, Thanh Ngyuen, Senior Website Usability Consultant, BusinessOnLine, offered great insight as to how to design a website, and some of the big design mistakes not to make. As she was mentioning all these I was going through our website in my head and checking off what we did right and what we need to improve on our new website. One thing she mentioned is including a search box in your site. Google Custom Search allows you to do this and only search on content within your site. We only have 2-5 seconds to grab our users attention, and if they come to our website and can’t find something and there’s no search box, chances are we’ll lose that visitor permanently out of their frustration for not being able to find what they were looking for. So the tip of the day… add a search box to your website. Your visitors will thank you for it!
