A word is worth a thousand pictures

Long live the king! No, no, not a flesh and blood monarch, but the "King" of internet traffic: CONTENT. And not static, never-changing, content, but vibrant, intertesting, dynamic content that sends the Google spider-bots scurrying around websites like a re-make of "Arachnaphobia".

It is a mistake of most small business websites I see in the South West of France, around the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Dordogne, that they try to copy big company websites by using lots of flash graphics and being spartan with words. But big companies already (by definition) have brand presence and reputation and a customer base that guarantees them a certain amount of internet traffic. They can afford to be more flash.

And in similar vein, small companies then ape the big by using such generic industry phrases about their offering that those words really don't work for them at all (either for human visitors or the Google-bots, both of which sets of visitors leave the site no wiser than when they visited!).

Again, big companies and small companies necessarily must differ in their use of words on the web. Big companies typically target large customer bases with commodity-type products, requiring "one-size-fits-all" marketing words too (whose advertising they can also afford to pay for). Small companies really don't generally cater for a mass market with commodity products (and generally can't afford the $20 per click costs that go with them). Their language by definition should be far better targetted (and this always ends-up cheaper for advertising too).


On the internet, content is king. And if you really can't naturally work enough relevant text into your website pages - or it really does look end up looking like an old school text book - then this is what blogs and Article pages can help-out with. All these pages can be linked to your website to increase your verbal "real estate" on the web over time without cluttering up the visual presentation of your message.

For small businesses the mindset should not (a priori) be about pretty graphics (whether or not relevant to your content). Of course you need a good-looking website, but the prevailling mindset should be marketing first, and good looks and funky technology second. So few small business designers seem to understand this. A Word really is worth a thousand pictures.