Smart Arts - Creative New Zealand

HIGHQUALITYFor a website to make apositive impact on yourmarketing campaign, it mustbe of the same highstandard as all your otherpublicity material. If youonly have a very smallamount of money budgetedfor a website, it may bebetter to establish a webpresence by placing yourinformation on otherwebsites.• a combination of the above – handle simple text changes in-house and contract outanything more complex• to get a “maintenance interface” developed, which allows you to update some or allsections of the website without the need for web authoring software.Getting links from other sitesPeople in your target audience will already be making regular use of other arts-relatedwebsites. The challenge is to get them from those sites over to your site or the site whereyour show is listed.Firstly, identify sites of interest to your target audience. There are three main ways tolocate the websites you think your target audience will be visiting:• by searching for sites on the internet using a New Zealand-based search engine such aswww.searchnow.co.nz or a global search engine such as www.google.co.nz. Use searchterms that you think people would use to look for events such as yours• by looking at the links pages of relevant websites• by asking known audience members what websites they visit.Ideally, you should have your website listed on the sites that your target markets visitmost often. When you have identified sites of interest, find out if they have a links page.If they do, you can ask them to provide a link to your site.Other websites will link to you because:• your site fits their criteria for linking• your site is relevant to their visitors• you’ve submitted your site to their links or event pages• there is an agreement between your sites to host “reciprocal links”.To ask for a link, e-mail their webmaster or web editor (generally their details can befound in the “about us” or “contact us” section of their site) and ask for a link.Offer them a reciprocal link, and consider offering a commission on ticket sales orcomplimentary tickets as an incentive.TestingWhen the information and links are all in place but before you “go live”, it pays todouble-check that the information is ordered logically.A good way to test the site structure is to test several people who are unfamiliar with thesite against a list of questions: e.g. “Find ticketing information on our current show.”Observe them as they navigate the site looking for information on your test sheet. Ifinformation is hard or impossible to find, consider how the site structure can be improved.When you’re testing technical details such as download times, it pays to do the testing ona range of internet browsers (e.g: current and older versions of Explorer and Netscape)because different problems show up on different browsers.Marketing on the web6Smart arts | Toi huatau65