The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist Review

We delivered a website this week and basked happily in the clients’ response, “Love it!” But for the business owner, receiving a website for final approval can be a bit of a quandary. Especially if you’re planning to take care of the website yourself, how can you know that it’s a good website that will function the way you want it to?

The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist Period! by Stoney deGeyter gives you thirty-six checklists with ten to twenty items in each. If checking off hundreds of  items sounds to you like a less than frolicsome evening, don’t worry — the book is set up in a way that makes it easy to find the things that actually apply to your website. If you don’t have ecommerce, you can skip all the related checklists. If you’re wondering whether you need a FAQ page, you can quickly read a couple of paragraphs and be ready either to make a decision or to discuss the question with your web team.

When you decide that you need to use a checklist, you’ll find an introduction that explains the basics of the specific list and why it’s important. For example, your contact page, the book explains, is intended to let your visitors contact you, and also to show signs of trustworthiness.

There are a dozen points in the checklist:

• Is your contact page easy to find?
• Are there several different ways you can be contacted?
• Do you have your phone number, and any important secondary numbers on the page?
• Do you need to give your fax number?
• Do you show your email address (and why you should)?
• Do you have a contact form?
• Do you want to offer instant chat services?
• Do you want to offer separate contact points for different departments?
• Do you want to give your hours of operation?
• Do you have a map?
• Is there some call to action or encouragement to get in touch?
• Are you asking for more information in your web form than you should?

This is thorough. More thorough than conversations with your web firm might be. For example, I don’t think we’ve ever suggested adding a fax number to a client who didn’t ask for it first. We also take care of most of these without any conversation, because we know you need these things. But you might not have considered all these points, and you might want to do so.

This book includes not just basic web pages and site optimization ideas, but also checklists for digital marketing. For example, in the analytics section, there is a checklist item saying to connect your webmaster tools and your analytics and one reminding you to exclude your internal traffic. These are things that are very easy to overlook if you don’t have a professional taking care of your analytics, and they can make a big difference in the usefulness of your data.

The items don’t usually come with instructions for how to do them; this really is a book of checklists. If you’re a DIY web marketer, though , you’ll have enough information to Google what you need to do. There is no assumption of tech knowledge, and you’ll probably find this a handy book if you’re ready to step up your digital marketing.

I received a copy of this book for review. I was not paid for this review, and you know I always tell you the truth.