Ring in the New Year with a 2011 Sales and Marketing Plan! The First Step – Website Redesign

Did you achieve your marketing and more importantly your sales goals for 2010?  At AMM Communications, Ann Marie and I have spent the last several weeks assessing where we could improve our sales and marketing efforts for not only our clients, but for our firm as well.  We tried a great deal of different approaches to marketing our business in 2010 and for the most part, they worked, but there are some key lessons that we would like to pass along to you.  My blog posts over the next few weeks will outline our thought processes as we continue to evolve our marketing plan for AMM Communications.  Today, I would like to talk about website redesign.

Believe it or not, AMM Communications did not have an “official” website until May 2010.  When we first formed the company three years ago, we were so busy trying to land clients and ramp up the business, we only progressed so far as to register the domain names for ammcommunications.com with GoDaddy.  I tried using the GoDaddy templates on the Website Tonite platform with lackluster results.  The stock website templates looked dated and were loaded with stock photos, while the actual software itself was very difficult to manipulated.  So I started to investigate other platforms, and that is when I stumbled across Russ Henneberry’s Meetup group “Tiny Business, Mighty Profits”, where I learned about the glories of WordPress.  Ann Marie and I are writers, marketers, PR, and social media consultants, so a blogging platform was the perfect basis for our new website.  Not having any coding skills myself, I decided to learn as much as I could from Russ’ website as well as step-by-step guides on YouTube.  To ring in the New Year at AMM Communications, I even decided to change the theme and format of our website, which was very easy.  The most difficult part was deciding which theme to use.

So if you are contemplating creating your own website, I highly recommend WordPress because it is easily updated, SEO friendly, and offers a professional look that you can do yourself!