The CEO of my company once said to me, “A good website is worth ten sales guys.”  The surprising part of this assertion is that our CEO is a die-hard sales guy, and has been for many years, and to him, a great sales team - that is, people on the phone and in meetings with potential customers - is his number one priority.

But he does have a point.  In the online world, your website is your number one sales and marketing tool, and the way you present it to the public can determine your company’s immediate and long-term future in the marketplace.

It is important to consider this as so many of you are veering in a “marketing with social media” direction, which, though still in its infancy, is proving to provide fantastic results with minimal spend, something that is extremely attractive in the current economy.  However, with this migration to social networks, blogging/microblogging, and viral media, a website is often left dusty and neglected in the background.  This is one of the worst things to happen, because, like it or not, in the online world your website will always be perceived as the number one face of your company.  Plus, any good online marketing campaign has a corporate website as its centerpiece.

So what role is your website playing now?  Is it merely a brochure, a high-level glimpse into what your company does, or is it an evolving, informative, and interactive sales machine?

If your answer is the former, but you realize the importance of making your website become the latter, do consider the following points in your mission.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

On the very basic level, ensure that your website is optimized for search engines.  If you’ve not done this before, there are plenty of great resources out there that cover the importance of crisp title tags, keyword-rich meta descriptions, effective link-building techniques, and meaty content.  And if you have done this before, remember that things get outdated very quickly on the ‘Net, so it might be a good time for you to do a thorough sweep of your site to ensure that everything is nicely aligned in true SEO fashion.

Exploit the Customizability of Your Corporate Site

By having a presence on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, for example, you can easily market to your ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ but think about how those profile pages are laid out.  You can’t create a realistically usable support forum for your customers.  You can’t create registration forms for potential customers to fill out in order to join your mailing list.  Sure, you can add your press releases, announcements, blog articles, and so on, but you have little to no say over how they look and feel.  Take advantage of the fact that your website - the central hub of your entire online existence - can be changed to look exactly as you want it to look, feel exactly as you want it to feel, and portray your message exactly as it is intended.

Manage the Whole Sales Cycle in One Place

Your web site should not be an outward-looking glorified advertisement for your company.  As with all methods by which people build communities with social media, your web site needs to

• contain information for both potential and existing clients
• allow for discussion about your product or service, whether in a forum or a blog setting
• have enough dynamic content to bring visitors back to your site, or at least have them voluntarily subscribe to your RSS feeds or email list for update notifications
• be interactive enough, whether with forms so that potential and existing customers have easy, straightforward methods for getting in touch with you

Bring the basic theories of social media into your web site and use these as your foundation.  From here, your site can be a one-stop-shop for the community that your efforts are constantly building.  Through the use of these methods, and by working on your web site as much as you work on your other social media outlets, you can turn your corporate website into a smooth, customer-attaining machine.

• Strategies to Make Your Website a Powerful Internet Marketing Tool
  
• How to Use Your Website to Make Your Company More Profitable
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation

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Bill Cammack, new media consultant and freelance video editor, posted the following on Twitter this morning:

Go Google yourself from 2001! :D => http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Who can resist a line like that?  I followed the link - of course - and Google myself, expecting a number of dead links to come up that alluded to my beginnings in web design.  Thanks to web.archive.org, the links were not dead, and so I was able to get a glimpse of my past.

I wrote a post back in March entitled Forays into Web Design, which described some of the early projects in which I immersed myself while still in high school.  One of the sites mentioned was HoMM3 Unleashed, a 100+ page monster that covered everything one would ever want to know about 3DO’s new (at the time) entry into the Heroes of Might and Magic PC game series.  The image above was captured from the Google 2001 search that Bill referred to, and it was the first time I’d seen that site in its original state since I closed it down and passed it to a colleague at the end of my high school career, and I think it’s great to get a glimpse at my roots in the web world.  This is especially amusing for me because everything I used to build the site was basic, basic, basic: a shareware version of Paint Shop Pro for the graphics, Notepad for writing the HTML, no CSS, etc.

I think this is a prime example of how the Internet never forgets.

Whether you’re in marketing, graphic design, or web development, at some point in your career you will run into the need to have an online portfolio. While a hard-copy version is still great for interviews - and make sure you have a swanky folder in which to hold the items - so much business is done over the ‘Net now that lacking an online portfolio can actually be detrimental to your career.

Thanks to a shout-out by DesignFlavr, I came across an article that details some of the biggest mistakes individuals make when designing their online portfolio layouts. Kyle Meyer of Astheria trudged through two hundred different portfolios and drew a number of conclusions from the layouts that he saw, from the altogether annoying background music that plays automatically upon entering the site to a lack of contact information to poor navigation. The result was a post entitled “My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too.”

My online portfolio is guilty of utilizing thumbnails, I’ll admit, but I’m redesigning it as we speak so I’ll definitely keep some of these “what not to do” hints at the back of my mind. In the meantime, take a look at your own portfolio and then check out the article, and its follow-up, “Portfolios that Accomplish Goals,” available here.

• Build a Killer Online Portfolio in 9 Easy Steps
• Improving the Quality of Leads Through Your Online Portfolio
• Online Portfolio - Web Designer’s Number One Weapon

10. Quake (id Software)

The dominance of the first-person shooter began in 1996 with the release of Quake, and with it came the wonders of online gaming. The single-player story consists of a government teleportation experiment gone horribly awry, in which hordes of deadly foes break through a portal and destroy everybody but you. The game’s graphics and music - the latter composed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - were unmatched by any other at the time, even id Software’s own Doom series, and paved the way for a lucrative set of games that included Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

9. Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms)

I was first attracted to the Duke Nukem games simply because the lead character was just so f-ing cool. Yet another first-person shooter on this list, the game was released the same year as Quake but was entirely different in its look and feel; where Quake was dark, bloody, and rough, Duke Nukem was colorful, bloody, and, to a certain extent, amusing as hell. A game that allows you to have a weapon that shrinks enemies to the size of Barbie dolls is absolutely good for hours of fun.

8. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (LucasArts)

While never a Star Wars geek, I was drawn to Jedi Knight for a number of reasons: a) the positive sneak peeks that kept showing up in the gaming magazines I read, b) the respect and trust I had for LucasArts, and c) the online gaming capabilities. With the help of my Diamond Monster 3D graphics card, the game took up a good number of hours of my teenage years, less so for its single-player storyline than for the multiplayer fun that included capture-the-flag, team games, and deathmatches. Of course, cheating was prevalent in these multiplayer games - unlike others, Jedi Knight had no fix for that - and the old-school servers could barely handle the load, but if you could get beyond the lag and you had a blazing-fast 56k modem, you were good to go.

7. Grim Fandango (LucasArts)

Continuing on my path of “LucasArts, rah, rah, rah!” (as five of the ten games listed here were created by that company), when I first saw the screenshots for Grim Fandango I was absolutely floored. Released in 1998, the game had probably the most beautiful cartoon graphics I had ever seen. Based on the Mexican concept of Día de los Muertos, the tone of the entire game is inherently dark with a humorous twist. I honestly spent hours upon hours working my way through the game, and its intricate puzzles and captivating storyline had me hooked all the way through.

6. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (LucasArts)

Though I was only eight when Monkey Island 2 was released, I managed to rediscover it in my early ‘teens. You play Guybrush Threepwood, a swashbuckling young stud who’s on a search for both a treasure (the Big Whoop) and the girl of your dreams, only to be interrupted by the resurrection of your old foe, the infamous pirate LeChuck. Hysterically funny, verging on rude, Monkey Island 2 hosts a wealth of pop-culture quotes, tough puzzles, and lovable characters that led me to play the game time and again, long after I’d beaten it for the first time.

5. Half-Life (Sierra Entertainment, Valve Software)

In 1998, probably the best first-person shooter was released, and the gaming world was never going to be the same. Half-Life was the most talked-about game in a decade, and while it lacked the traditional level structure of past games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D (you simply keep playing in kind of a continuous way, moving from one place to the next at your own pace), the entertainment value never faltered. Gorgeous to look at, mind-blowing to listen to, and difficult but manageable to play, Half-Life is likely to be seen as the grandfather of many of the great shooters of today.

4. Wolfenstein 3D (id Software)

In addition to being the first popular first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D was also one of the first examples of viral marketing gone totally right. Released as shareware, the game’s popularity flourished with the ease of copying the game; additionally, in 1994 Wolfenstein was banned in Germany for its use of the Nazi Swastika and anthem. The publicity didn’t stop there: when Wolfenstein was released for Super NES, the cartoon blood was replaced with sweat, and the guard dogs in the game were removed due to animal-rights activists protesting about, well, shooting cartoon animals. *pause* Anyway. With Wolfenstein constantly making headlines, the game maintained its popularity throughout the 1990s and has spawned a few sequels, with the next in the series under development now for PC, XBox 360, and Playstation 3.

3. Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts)

I have to give a shout-out to DoTT, especially since I rediscovered the wonders of this point-and-click adventure game recently when I bought the original on eBay. The sequel to 1987’s creepy Maniac Mansion, DoTT involves a trio of friends attempting to save the world from domination by the oversized, angry Purple Tentacle with the use of a time machine. In typical LucasArts adventure game fashion, the game is chock-full of humorous, illogical puzzles involving, at times, key characters from colonial America - George Washington, Betsy Ross, Ben Franklin, et cetera. Though the game itself is rather short, the creativity you need to use to get through each part of the game is extraordinary, and DoTT remains to this day my favorite adventure game ever.

2. Sid Meier’s Civilization (MicroProse)

My dad brought this home for me one day when I was twelve, and I have yet to find another game so engrossing that I can easily lose four hours at one time playing it. A single-player, turn-based strategy, Civilization offers you the opportunity to build an empire while competing with two to six other civilizations for wealth, knowledge, military prowess, and technology. The game developed into further releases, including CivNet, the online version, as well as Civilizations II, III, IV, and, most recently, Revolution, which I finally purchased after futile attempts to get it at my local Best Buy - it kept selling out.

1. Outlaws (LucasArts)

If any game influenced my career path, it was the first person shoot-’em-up Outlaws. Forever a fan of Westerns, the release of Outlaws took up all of my (rare) free time because of its addictive single-player storyline, the thrill of online play and the close-knit nature of its online community, and, of course, the creation of Outlaws Unleashed, a site I created to be the de facto resource for Outlaws players and which was featured in the unfortunately now-defunct PC Games Magazine.