Web design on a web marketing track. If a great design falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, did it get you a result? No of course it didn’t which is why truly great web design is purpose-driven, web marketing track goal specific and has an emphasis on functionality to drive the consumer to calls-to-action. Form must follow function, not the other way around.

And less is always more – it should be easy for the client to see how to navigate with a simple and consistent menu system such as a bar with buttons across the top, so no matter where you are in the site you know how to get to where you want to go which is where any smart business owner wants you to be.

And now in these challenging financial times, especially for service provider businesses such as salons, spas and gyms where individual service providers all operate under the same roof, the menu bar needs to have an easily customizable sub-menu area for each operator’s very own sub-web-site.

You see the new web marketing track model in an era of Google, Face Book and You Tube is to have the main company site with mini sub-sites for each of the employees. Therefore a truly great web designer is someone who not only understands design but understands the mechanics of an individual employee being on her or his web marketing track.

A web marketing track is defined as what starts out as a single page site for an employee consisting of an online video portfolio of his or her work and then through an educational process and facilitation, becomes the launching of an ongoing series of campaigns.

Each campaign, which occurs weekly, twice-monthly or at least monthly, is blasted by email to each of the individual service provider’s own client base, providing incentive for the client recipient to click on the link.  When the client clicks on the link it takes him or her to the latest online video portfolio page that has been added to the individual operator’s sub-site.

So imagine if you will that you have 100 employees and each of those employees is on her or his web marketing track with her or his own sub-site within your site. That means 100 times the marketing for you, because each of your individual employees is not only promoting herself or himself to client sub-groups but are collectively promoting your company as a whole as well.

Any service provider business that is not following this web marketing track model is not operating at an optimum. And of course the complexity of creating niche customized and continually tested web marketing tracks education and campaigns for each employee is a daunting task. 

That is why now more than ever web design should not stand in the way of results. It should be a facilitator and assist the web marketing track model in achieving success. Again, form following function.

Also of course with an eye to making it easy for the site maintainer to do regular updates which for a company of 100 employees means that at a minimum there will be 100 new pages added to the site monthly.

If the designer designs a site in the tradition print-graphic-designer model of each page being a radically different art piece without clear and clean navigation consistency, any web marketing track efforts will fail.

The message is clear, the graphic designer and the web marketing track expert need to work closely from the very beginning to design a web site where form follows the web marketing track function. Otherwise It’s like an architect making a design for a house with no knowledge of construction. It may look pretty but do the doors open? And in keeping with that metaphor, the digital tools don’t build the house – the strategy does.

More important than tools and design are the web marketing track strategies. These strategies are created, implemented and tracked by web marketing track experts in a customized manner on behalf of every employee. The goal is to achieve results for the employee and employer in the ultimate win-win situation and recession-buster.

If design is not a part of this solution it is a part of the problem. But if conversely a great design falls in the forest and it lands on the head of a niche-specific targeted prospect, the employee gets the result, the company gets the result and the design truly has served its web marketing track purpose!  Web design on a web marketing track.

Yianni Stamas is a filmmaker, educator and web marketing track expert of VideoFilmWeb.com Inc. at Dramatics NYC. He is also the editor of the free
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