As professional speakers, marketing is critical to staying in business. Marketing is what controls our income and business level. As someone who speaks as part of another business, marketing is equally critical. It means you'll have an audience and that others in your organization will appreciate your role in building the business as a whole.

101 Uses for a Dead Web Designer

by Tom Antion

I've developed something of a reputation as someone who hates Web designers. That's unfair. I don't hate all Web designers. Just most of them. It's alright, though; the feeling appears to be mutual.

Actually, Web designers can be an important part of your online marketing team, but only if you know how to manage them. In this context, "manage" means "give them clear assignments, limit their scope to what they can and should be doing, and keep them out of places they know nothing about."

Your Web site is presumably designed to sell stuff. Aesthetics are secondary. This is not something a Web designer, who almost certainly started life as a graphic designer or, worse yet, an artist, wants to hear. That doesn't make it less true. Left to their own devices, most Web designers will produce for you a site that is almost too beautiful to touch...and your customers won't. These designers will want to junk up your site with 25 cool-looking animated buttons and two million little, tiny text links. When you object, they'll sniff and mutter something about Yahoo!'s success with this new look. Great. Yahoo! can afford to plaster every bus in America with an ad. Trying to follow in their footsteps can be fatal to your site and its mission.

So what SHOULD you use a Web designer for? I suggest you consider confining your Web designer to the following tasks:

• creating the initial design and navigation system
• designing and implementing forms

That's it. Then make sure that the site they leave you with is one you or someone on your direct team can update easily with a tool like Microsoft FrontPage. (I can already hear the whining of the professional Web designer. "FrontPage sucks. It messes up your code." I dare you to
find a business person who understands or cares about FrontPage's technical problems. They just want to make money. I can make $20,000 using FrontPage to update my Web site in the time it takes most designers to start a project proposal.)

By the way, while your designer is coming up with the initial design, make certain that they understand the importance of a design that incorporates keywords for search engines right into the design of the site.(If you don't know how to do this, find out. Now. It's crucial to your success. (Trust me.) Chances are pretty good that when you tell them that, they'll say, "That's not a designer's job, that's a programmer's job or a marketer's job." If they say that, fire them. Run away fast. Save your money. Find a designer who understands how crucial it is that they design EVERY aspect of your site, not just the visible stuff that they think is cool and that their friends will congratulate them for.

Bottom line: manage your Web designer to ensure that you end up with a site that sells and that you can manage and maintain without their help.

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Tom Antion is an expert on Internet marketing for small business. He is the founder of the rapidly becoming infamous Butt Camp Seminars, which focus on low cost and low risk Internet Marketing methods and explain how you can earn money while sitting at home on your rear end. Tom is also the chief spokesperson for CBS Switchboard.com in their small business outreach program "MainStreetsOnline." To contact Tom mailto:tom@antion.com or visit http://www.buttcamp.com