The Editors Blog

On agency Web site wishes

We released our Book of Lists on Monday. This year, we dropped the movie and 15 minutes of fame categories replaced then with agency Web sites we liked and didn’t like, and corporate blogs we liked and didn’t like.

We went through a lot of agency Web sites and, in our opinion, found most were average, some were very bad, and few were really good. This should be disheartening to the industry. Here are some of the most troubling elements that you might want to fix up, if your Web site is guilty of having (or not having) these.

In somewhat of a particular order.

1) RSS feed. PR agencies are in the message disseminating business. More than a few of your audience members prefer to get their information this way. It’s not difficult or expensive to set up.

2) Boring or poorly created homepage. If your homepage doesn’t resonate with your brand, it has failed. If it is not sharp-looking, with proper white space, clean aesthetics, and simple navigation, you are risking a terrible first impression.

3) Avatars. In the words of those irascible , DO NOT WANT. Web sites with one take forever to load, and the avatars are either annoying or engage in terrible attempts at humor.

4) Thought leadership. If your Web site just features static content, you are not giving anyone a reason to return to your site, you are not increasing your results in Google, and you are not positioning your agency as a thought leader.

5) Flash and PDF news releases. See above. Google does not read Flash and PDFs well, if at all. Make sure the site is all HTML with meta tags and optimization. Otherwise, your rankings will suffer.

If you have more examples of bad sites - or more rules to follow, please do so in the comments.

2 Comments so far

  1. [...] (who is either too shy to blog or needs some SEO help), Henry Copeland, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, Keith O’Brien, Richard Edelman, Rick Murray (another hidden/nonexistent blog–irony noted), David Dunne, [...]

  2. [...] Kim with 12.7%, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel at 11.8%, David Brain at 10.9%, Max Kalehoff at 7.2%, Keith O’Brien and Henry Copeland at 6.4%, Dr. Walter Carl, Sarah Petersen and Charlene Li at 5.5%, Jim Tobin and [...]

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