Technology issues covering web, business and paradigm changers

The people at Google have been busy. They have developed a system called App Inventor that not only puts the power of smartphone app development into the consumer’s hands but in doing so they have also given professional developers a great tool for modeling, whether they realize or not.

Smartphone app development is a complicated process, whether it’s for iPhones or the Android market. Modeling an app on paper is a good approach to visualizing its logic and utility. With this new tool, however, modeling app behavior jumps off the paper and into a real-world system to be test driven. A simple app using this framework can yield real-time feedback on how it performs, and apps that are too complicated for App Inventor can be scaled up using the newly developed core. It’s only for Android at the moment but modeling can represent behavior on an iPhone too; development for iPhones would still require its proprietary SDK kit.

So to all you consumers with visions of app greatness, drag and drop your way into a fortune! The power is yours!

My grandparents were pretty thrifty. Their spending behaviors were heavily influenced by The Great Depression and for years they would reuse rubber-bands, bacon grease and foil. However extreme their habits I cannot blame them for wanting to save some $$.  And in these tough financial times you can also save money on your search marketing dollars: use your website’s form-enabled contact page as a landing page substitute.

A Landing Page of Sorts

An important element of a search marketing campaign is to create a simple “on-message” landing page on your website. Your web developer’s brilliant page copy helps grease the wheels to facilitate a conversion (i.e., converting a visitor into a lead). But if you’re trying to cut back on web development money this post is for you. If your conversion is a simple lead harvesting form (name, email and phone) then your contact page could very well serve as a cost-effective way to achieve that goal.

The drawbacks to doing it this way are numerous, but we’ll focus on the most important.

1. Your landing page record will have no history, no rings in the tree: Your company’s contact page is typically one static document, but landing pages are cumulative and provide a “searchable” record of your digital marketing efforts.
2. Analytics will be limited: A lead from your contact page can give you a tingle! Here is a potential new customer that “sought you out”, but you cannot tell from the form, usually, how they got there. Was it from a blast? Which one? A recent postcard mailing?
   
3. Human nature: A contact page is devoid of copy related to your blast or campaign, so if you funnel visitors there hope they remember its purpose when they come back from whatever was distracting them. Well written copy on a landing page serves to funnel a visitor into a lead, and without one there is no bait on your hook.

Workarounds

1. Ok, no history. If that’s not important then you could do the following: Describe in your blast that they’ll be directed to the contact form, or simply add some copy at the top of your contact page related to the blast. It would change accordingly with each blast. You’ve essentially hijacked your company’s contact page but you’re trying to save money, right?
2. Alright, reduced analytics. You’ll piece together the breadcrumb trail: Sift through your hosting log files and look for the date range of the blast, correlate contact page hits with this date range. Do you see a spike in contact page hits compared with other date ranges of the same length?
3. Human nature. Hmmm… Well, if we had an answer to that one we’d be “millionaires of the world!”

But all this is temporary. When the economy is humming again you won’t need to worry about this cost saving measure, since it is only suggested as a way to save some digital marketing dollars in tough times. Landing pages have a purpose and circumventing them will quite often reduce the efficiencies of your time.