Sitemaps are a fairly typical method interactive agencies employ to communicate website structure and content flow. Sitemaps do a fairly good job at communicating the site architecture on small to mid sized websites; yet they are somewhat unwieldy for larger sites, so try this approach.

At Imulus we use OmniGraffle to quickly develop sitemaps for our clients. For large sites we approach a sitemap in various phases.

Phase 1: The General Overview
Work with the client to define the top level and sub level content structure. Focus on the priority and the organization of which items will appear in the top 2 levels. Often you will find this is the most time consuming area to find agreement on.

Phase 2: Breakdown Each Section
Take each section and develop a separate sitemap dedicated to that section. This will allow you to focus on the specific content under level 3 and 4.

Phase 3: Change Management
Get client sign-off on phase 1 before moving into phase 2. This *should* help in controlling changes which move content from section to section. Get approval on phase 2 by section. For instance, work on the product section first before moving forward into the solution section or the support section.

Hopefully this process will help you better define site architecture while minimizing changes.

Lately it seems more and more people are complaining about the shear volume of the emails they are receiving on a daily basis. Between customers, friends and family, not to mention spam; we are increasingly getting distracted.

One of the best ways to minimize the distraction is to increase the time period which your email client auto-checks for new emails. Using Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird, Mail or whatever your favorite email client is, you can change the default auto-check time.

When we first started shop I had the auto-checking set at 1 minute. That worked great for a little while, until I realized I was getting disrupted every few minutes the email “ding.”

By moving my default check time to 30 minutes I now have been able to apply more focus to getting work done, rather then responding to every email I’ve received the minute I receive it.

With Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube and Apple’s announcement of it’s iTV product are we seeing the dawn of living room accessible web TV? With Google Founder Eric Schmidt on the Apple board of directors the interaction between Apple and Google has really heated up.

When Steve Jobs demoed the iTV it was loaded with Disney movies and trailers. Conceivably Apple could hook into YouTube, allowing users  to stream video into the living room.

Google, utilizing it’s AdWords program to deliver text based ads alongside the delivered video would then provide a revenue stream for Google which might eventually turn a profit for YouTube.

Just a thought, it should be interesting to see where this YouTube purchase goes.

Everytime I work on generating a monthly PPC / SEO report for our clients I find myself asking the same questions.

• How much is too much information?
• Do you REALLY need to tweak PPC campaigns more then once or twice a month, once the campaign has been established?
• What is the most concise way to show data?

The more monthly search reports I see from competing search engine marketing agencies the more I’ve begun to notice the trend of “shock-n-awe” reporting. By this I mean reports which are 30 plus pages of Excel data dumped in by some automated program at micro sized type. These reports often include 2-3 paragraphs of human analysis and that’s all.

It seems to me that search engine marketing agencies should be working harder to interpret and condense marketing reports that are catered to clients rather then overwhelming the client with shear stats. Many reports I’ve looked at have ‘interesting’ data but they lack action items or substantive analysis. As this trend continues these reports are beginning to look more and more like the server log files which the report was meant to interpret. Perhaps soon we will see the creation of a new specialist, Search Engine Marketing Report Analyst. A position created just to interpret the search engine marketing reports.

Over the years we’ve learned that not every project is a good match. It helps to decide what your ideal clients look like in advanced. Is there a industry which you prefer to work in? Does your ideal client need a certain level of yearly revenue? Do you prefer start-ups or established companies?

Answering these questions will make it far easier to qualify which clients are the best fit. Going after projects solely for the money at stake is certainly not the best reason to do the work.