Mar 9, 2007

You're Like a Toothpick in the Cake.

  1. ePrize Blog - Ideally, this could be Josh Linkner's baby where he could post any articles he's written, talk about his speaking engagements, and generally inform folks of what he and ePrize have been up to. A great PR tool and, perhaps, it might bump blogs like this one out of the ranks of search engines.
  2. News Page as RSS - Create a back end system to allow the ePrize PR maven to cut, paste, and format articles that would feed into the ePrize news page as XML to be parsed out as XHTML. Allow users to sign up for this as an RSS feed or as an email update (a la Feedburner). This would eliminate production time as well as increase SEO while also showing that ePrize can handle current technology.
  3. Promotions Page as RSS - Likewise, maintaining the list of current promotions via a tool that could tag promotions as the handful of categories (Automotive, CPG, Media, etc), sort them and utilize the promotion end date to pull any "dead" promotions could make this an automatic process rather than a manual drudgery. Likewise, if these could feed out as an RSS feed where users would be notified of new promotions would be ideal. Eliminate manual processes and increase visibility, sounds pretty good to me.
  4. Skin 404 Page - As I was surfing I hit a 404 page on Eprize.com. It was very ugly. This doesn't have to be the case.
  5. ICO across the board - The <link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="images/e_box.ico"> tag should be on every page, not just the home page.
  6. Become Standards Compliant - The ePrize.com site is a mess of Flash and Table-based HTML. It's time to actually make this site as advanced as the compliant coding ePrize used to use on all of its promotions. This will increase flexibility, SEO, and make it look like the company actually can use web technology as it should.
  7. Fire Copywriter - Get rid of whoever wrote up the job descriptions on the Careers page. "You're like a toothpick in the cake" is some of the worst copy I've ever read. It's up there with "You're the sizzle on the steak." These Cole Porter wannabe lines are the cream in my coffee.
  8. Use Meta Tags on Promotions - I sent this one to a software engineer over a year ago and it doesn't look like it took hold. There's nothing more annoying than Googling "ePrize" to come across scads of expired promotion pages. Proper use of META tags would help keep promotions out of the search engines. Of course, there are some major promotions that would have done well with proper SEO and meta information (Palm, Pampers, etc) but those "one and done" promotions don't really need to live in perpetuity, do they?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Are you SURE you're not Mike White? He used to make those kinds of pithy little suggestion lists all the time.

Good suggestions one and all. I remember that Les Orchard was all about "If you have to do something more than once, automate it." It's a shame that mentality went the way of the dodo.

PS Isn't a toothpick in a cake a choking hazard? Even money that Alesya Opelt wrote this.

Unknown said...

One other thing -- I'm surprised that there isn't a Linkner blog already. Seems like he would have been, um, inspired by Seth Godin on this count as well.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/