Get I.T. Out of Marketing

I find it fascinating how often I.T. is assigned to the task of building a website. For the uninitiated, this may seem like a logical thing to do. After all, a website is technology and requires programming and stuff, right?

Wrong.

A very small part of a website is programming. A very small part of a website is technology. Oh, it might take a lot of work. It might be a requirement for the site to function properly, but I.T. should really not have a say in what the customer sees… the face or the marketing aspect of the site.

In my opinion, here are the top five components of a website… in order of importance.

1. Graphical Presentation - all the pretty pictures. All the pretty buttons. This is the first thing someone sees. This is the first thing that can turn them away.
2. User interface - This tells people where to go. What do they do next, etc. this may be second to the graphical presentation, but it is a very close second.
3. Content - Well, you need content to put on the buttons and graphics, but there is also core site content. People will see pictures and captions of pictures before they ever see this. The may not even read this.
4. Social aspects - Blogs, forums and support features. If you don’t have the core content or pretty graphics, this won’t matter. It especially won’t matter if people don’t know how to get there from the user interface.
5. Programming - programming comes last. Of course, there may be programming required to accomplish any of the above, it is last for one very important reason. If you don’t have the above figured out, programming doesn’t matter. If your designer doesn’t create graphics, your programmers can’t install it. If you don’t know what you want the user interface to look like, your programmers can’t build it. If you don’t have your content written, your programmers can't paste it in.

So, get I.T. out of the website design and put marketing on it. Either get it done with an in house marketing team to do it or outsource it. Either way, don’t depend on I.T. to build you a great website. Oh, they might be able to pull it off, but those types of I.T. people aren’t nearly as common… besides, even if they could, should I.T. really be setting your marketing direction?

Corey Smith is the webmaster for CopierCatalog.com.

He also is the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems, the Editor in Chief for OfficeProductNews.net and provides a common sense approach to business and technology on his blog.

You can find him on Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn.