Today I received an interesting email from America’s Test Kitchen. I have been on their mailing list for the past year or two since I signed up for one of their free trials. They send me A LOT of emails…. 99.5% of which I don’t have time to read. So I was surprised to get the email below in my inbox today. It basically says, we noticed that you don’t read our emails, so we will unsubscribe you unless we hear from you.  I think this is a great strategy….they either get to keep me as a subscriber and keep marketing to me or they loose me as a subscriber, but leave me with a feeling of goodwill toward their brand.

We get calls all the time from people who want a website and would like a quote.  We always give them a fair price based on what we think it will cost to develop them a marketable website.  The keyword in the previous sentence is marketable.  A marketable website is different from just a website.  Anyone can develop a website, heck you can even get one for free at Google, Yahoo, or GoDaddy.  For 95% of businesses, developing a website without a marketing plan is a complete waste of time and money.  I completely understand getting competitive bids, however, the problem is that many businesses make their decision based on cost alone, forgetting that they are not making an apples-to-apples comparison.  A marketable website costs more money because a specific plan is developed to solve the most common web design money-wasting problems:

• How are you going to get a return on your investment?
• How are you going to get people to come to your website?
• What content do your website visitors expect/want to see?
• Does the website’s infrastructure support growth?
• Will the infrastructure be search engine friendly?

Let me give you an example, recently I looked at my son and thought to myself “this boy needs a haircut, his head looks like a mop.”  I was too lazy to make an appointment and take him to the hairdresser so I decided to do it myself.  “How hard could it be?” I asked myself.  So I got out my scissors and started snipping away.  I had seen how the hairdresser cut my husband’s hair…pull the hair between my fingers vertically and snip, snip snip.  About 100 snips later my son came out looking like “a monk” as my husband put it.  Two days later we made the trek to the hairdresser where he got a professional haircut that could land him a job modeling for Baby Gap   In that respect, the hairdressing industry is similar to that of web development.  Everyone can cut their hair or get a website for free, but the training and experience a professional provides will make you more marketable, changing the way others think, feel, and interact with you.