Queen Bee Marketing’s Blog About Marketing, SEO, and Design.

We hear this all the time from clients when starting a new Web site. My answer is, “Sure, we can do that, but will it help your business?” Looking “cool” isn’t always the best strategy for a business. There are three areas that could be harmed by just looking cool and not doing real research - branding, marketing, and SEO.

As we’ve talked about many times on this blog, branding is so important for a business. Your logo, storefront, packaging, atmosphere, and philosophies all go into your brand. Is creating a flashy, “cool” Web site right for your brand? In many cases it’s not. Think about your brand and who your customers are. Are you a professional with serious-minded clients? They will probably want to see an equally professional site where they can easily access the information they’re looking for. Is your audience not very technically savvy? You’ll want to keep things simple. Here’s a link to a blog I came across recently about “trying to be cool.” It’s a year old, but still very relevant to this topic. The last paragraph sums this up perfectly:

Authenticity, originality and uniqueness. If your brand doesn’t inherently have these traits, please… don’t attempt to be cool. You’ll look like you’re having a mid-life crisis, and you will be laughed at. You can play the “cool dad” who’s still a grown-up and acts accordingly, but don’t try to be 18 again. If it’s important to connect with the younger audience, don’t do it with your existing brand… this is the time for a new one that’s created from the ground up to appeal to a different mindset.

Similar to branding is your marketing plan. Your Web site needs to be consistent with the rest of your marketing. If the site is drastically different than the rest of the marketing pieces, customers may become confused and will have a harder time trusting your brand. Having a “cool” site isn’t worth it if it turns customers away.

Finally, having a “cool” site usually means implementing fancy “tricks” with Flash and Javascript. These can obviously have detrimental effects on SEO efforts if not done in moderation. Don’t get me wrong, Flash, Javascript, and other SEO-unfriendly techniques can add a lot of value to a site when used purposefully. But when it is done just to look “cool” it is unnecessary and could hinder the effectiveness of the site. If you want to gain leads from people finding your site, you need to make sure the search engines have an easy time indexing as much material as possible. As most SEOs will tell you, “What’s the point of a pretty site if no one sees it?”