February 2008 Archives

Earlier this morning, Ian sent me an email saying that the Portent Website code was great. Near perfect, even! But one thing was weighing on his mind. We weren’t passing the W3 Markup Validation. That giant red “THIS SITE ISN’T XHTML TRANSITIONAL!” message was searing into his poor SMX-addled eyeballs and I was the closest thing to Visine he could find. I coded this website myself, so I was set on the task of figuring out what exactly was wrong with the code and how I could fix it. But does validation even matter? The page displays correctly for the end user, right?

Why validation matters

We can’t all be valid. Even some top blogs don’t pass validation, including Boing Boing, Seth Godin’s blog and Engadget. Viewing these sites as they are now, the errors aren’t noticeable. Validation exists purely for code junkies and obsessive compulsive XHTML producers. You know, like me. Validation is all part of the grand unification project of the W3C, standardizing code on the web for maximum accessibility. Standards in code are good. Standards in code preserve the sanity of your coders. Anyone who has tried to update old outdated code on a website will agree; if we all just decided on how we were going to use this powerful stuff we call hypertext markup language to begin with our lives would have been easier. Validation exists to ensure your website is future-proof.

All soccer moms are not created equal. Copyblogger makes this point in a recent post, and I totally agree. Until we go beyond perfunctory profiling and start creating vivid, charismatic, three-dimensional characters, personas will be of no use except to perpetuate stereotypes. Marketers need to go further in their persona development if they are actually going to enrich our ad campaigns.

PI Pearl of Wisdom: Write personas like personal ads, not police reports.

Let’s consider the difference between the two persona possibilities. Here’s an example:

Exhibit A: Target Audience: 48-year-old Man, Drives Chevy, Some College.

Exhibit B: Lila, the energetic Sarah Lawrence Undergrad who plays field hockey, loves her Border Collie Oliver, and has a guilty pleasure for spaghetti-o’s on toast and buying things off infomercials after midnight.

I gave a talk about personas in search engine marketing today at SMX West, and then participated in a panel discussion on the topic.

You can grab the slides, and find links to others’ feelings on the presentation, here.

Or maybe I should say, the best linkbait never gets stale. Basically, my goal is to assault your blogging worldview and contradict everything you’ve ever heard on the subject-all for a good cause, of course.

In this post, I am going to tell you how to have a decent little blogging career, and even earn some industry panache, all without caving to the industry pressure to eat, sleep and dream in Movable Type.

It is possible, and here’s how I know. When I first started my career as Senior Blogger at Portent’s site Bridezilla.com in May of 2007, I wrote two posts that would go on to have some impressive star power in the blogosphere. The first, the Bridezilla Hall of Fame, is a humorous mock-apologetic detailing misunderstood bridezillas throughout history. It took me three days to write, which is pretty much tortoise years in the breakneck speed of the blogosphere.

While my competitors wrangled over the digg article d’jour, I was researching historical periods and pop culture lore, surveying my target audience for feedback, and going through arduous revisions to get the tone and verbiage absolutely perfect. When it was done, I did think it was one of the best pieces of copywriting I’d ever done, but I figured it would enjoy a nice blossom of traffic at site launch and then be buried in the graveyard of posts-past once fresher fare was served up.

But this wasn’t the case. Today, the Bridezilla Hall of Fame remains the single most-read blog post on the site, boasting 1,346 views over the next closest category’s 948 views. In addition to top billing for long-term traffic, this post has been excerpted extensively by other bloggers and a publisher has contacted me about publishing the piece in a wedding anthology coming out this fall.

The other piece I wrote at this time was linked today on NBC. This is even more stunning since the post has long been buried in Bridezilla’s very hostile archives and does not enjoy the same front page exposure as the Bridezilla Hall of Fame.

The main point is that I wrote both these pieces almost a year ago and then basically forgot about them (no recent linkbaiting, no new social marketing efforts).

So go ahead, go enjoy your Saturday night, or if you do stay in blogging, do it out of inspiration, not desperation. Any audience that will forget you after a day was too fickle to worry about in the first place, and it’s a slippery slope to blogging on your Blackberry in a bathroom stall.

I loathe the term “web 2.0”. I think catch phrases are easy and unimaginative, and calling the recent boom of easy to use and engaging websites “web 2.0” seems to cheapen them. It sounds too trendy.

It sounds like there will be a “web 3.0” and that “web 2.0” will become obsolete once we get bored of it. There’s a lot of new ideas on this old Internet, and they will keep coming as we continue to collaborate and refine the process in which we disseminate our data.

Innovation: Separate style from content

One brilliant revelation in coding for the web in recent years has been the separation of style from content. Gone are the days of using tags for presentation, now we utilize CSS to create styles that are easily swappable and flexible enough for our plastic Internet. Today I am going to show you a simple and attractive way to add flair to important links, while preserving the ideal of separating style from content.

(A quick note: If you don’t know World of Warcraft, skip about 4 paragraphs down. If you do know it, it’s thoroughly worth reading and pertinent. We at Portent love to geek out now and then.)

My best friend and her boyfriend recently started playing World of Warcraft, so I’ve reactivated my account after a year hiatus. While I’m an old timer with massively multiplayer roleplaying games, this is my friends’ first foray. I’ve been trying to teach them the internet gaming lingo and nuances to playing in a group (aggro management and the like).

I’m playing a priest because I thought it would be most helpful while my friends learned the game. They are playing a mage and warrior. I’ve done my healer duties diligently, keeping everyone alive while they pounded away massive damage. During one of these sessions, my warrior friend said, “These guys are lame... they aren’t even hurting me.”

I was stunned. They weren’t hurting him because I cast a damage shield that protected him from damage he would otherwise be taking!

The parallel to my job in QA hit me immediately. They didn’t realize what I was doing for them.

A quality assurance specialist is like a support class, just like a priest in WoW. While the designers, producers and developers are creating the way a page looks and the way it works, a QA specialist makes sure it all works together.

We’re geared to work with a team, not go-it-alone. While many small projects could function without the support of QA, it’s just like doing quests in WoW - you’ll get the job done but it will take a lot longer, and there’s less room for error. Large scale raids cannot function successfully without a good healer team, just like large projects without QA.

With the support of QA, you have the confidence to try amazing, risky things because we’ve got your back.

Whether you survive massive raids or projects isn’t due to just one person or class, but it is a sign of a well functioning team with everyone performing their specialties to the best of their abilities so we can all get the loot.

Cathy Braun is Portent Interactive’s Quality Assurance Lead and has somehow found a way to introduce real quality assurance in a marketing agency. No small feat.

The father loves to brag about his kids (as I do). The CEO loves to brag about his team. I’ll spare you the kids. But I do want to introduce some of the team, and brag about their accomplishments.

Tracy Beach is our COO and one of our creative leaders. He’s been with Portent since 2000, starting as an HTML developer and designer. On his first day here he had to help move the office. He stayed anyway, and has masterminded projects like GOIAM.ORG, the Tour of California web site and momAgenda. Really, though, he influences every design we do, and makes Portent one of the best at executing internet marketing.

Branden Root is our CTO. He started as an intern in 2001, showing up for work on his first day in a 3-piece suit. I’m not 100% sure what to call his expertise. I strongly suspect he thinks in code. He’s brought Portent the best in tools and techniques and keeps everything working as it should. Branden designed the system behind Bella Sara, and built the multiple-store software that runs Groomstand and its sister stores.

Anna Abraham designed this web site. She rocks!

Chris Furniss made this site a reality with Movable Type and his expertise in the social media world.

Matthew Henry built and continues to refine sophisticated tools for search engine optimization. He also understands regular expressions, which scares me a little.

Jade Ingmire heads up our copywriting team, but also provides creative leadership on all sorts of projects.

Cathy Braun has somehow found a way to introduce real quality assurance in a marketing agency. No small feat.

Our account team includes Ariana Burgess, Matthew Guiste, Stacy Conner, Sarah Mackay and Mike Fitterer. They bring not only project management expertise, but also strong marketing backgrounds. That’s why we call them account strategists. They don’t just hand messages back and forth. They guide marketing strategy.

Christopher Bachmann, Jann VanOver and Andy Schaff are some of our crack developers. They’re regularly called upon to figure out everything from Flash data integration to advanced, web-based printing systems. They’ve never failed to solve complex problems and roll out great software.

Sooo many others, too. I won’t stuff the blog full of my kvelling (Yiddish for bragging about someone’s accomplisments). Suffice it to say that I’m very proud of the folks we’ve gathered at Portent.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, my future posts will be chock-full of marketing thinking.

Oh! A blog! How quaint, you say. There’s most likely millions of blogs out there (I haven’t counted recently) so why would you want to read yet another blog? Especially yet another Internet Marketing blog! Here at Portent, we always strive to do something different. When most people hear “Search Engine Optimization” or “Internet Marketing” it conjures images of snake oil salesmen; black hat firms with shallow guarantees of top search engine rankings for three easy payments of $29.95 (cheap!).

We change the face of Internet Marketing on a daily basis using tried and true methods, uniquely developed by our firm. We’re honest, hard-working straight-shooters who love what we do. We genuinely care about our clients’ success and have the history to prove it.

So why would you want to add our blog to your already massive RSS list? Because you appreciate honesty and you love to learn. You’re all about improvement, whether it be for yourself, your business or your own clients. Our goal for the Portent Blog is not to spout our accolades back at you, we have a press release section for that. Our blog is to share with you some of the techniques and methods we have developed. The same techniques and methods that we use on a daily basis.

Portent is a full-service Internet Marketing firm. That means that we do it all, from design, to development to PPC and more. You’ll hear from each one of our departments, each author an expert in their fields and eager to share with you the stuff they love to do. You’ll find a variety of content, from what makes a killer landing page headline to how to slice a web site mock-up into semantic, keyword rich XHTML and CSS.

We’ve also got a brand-new website design, in case you didn’t notice. I’d like to give “mad props”, as the kids say, to Anna Abraham for her spectacular design that I had the privilege to code up.

Stay tuned for a whole boat-load of awesome.

Chris Furniss is a designer, HTML producer and social media guru at Portent Interactive since 2006. In his free time, he runs a podcast and blog of his own called The Weekly Geek.