Strategic Marketing Blog

I have seen people spend a lot of time hunting for the perfect AI prompt. If the right words could make AI understand the work, we could skip explaining what matters. But that is usually the part AI needs most. A request can sound clear and still leave out the audience, the source of the facts, or ...

Schools face a real problem: how can teachers tell whether students are learning or letting AI do the work? One professor hid a trap in an assignment. Other students had to defend their work after detection tools flagged it. Some teachers are turning to oral exams to hear students explain what they ...

I have spent a lot of time telling people that AI is useful, but it still needs a person in charge. In The Fallacy of AI: Why It's Brilliant But Still Needs You, I called it the smartest junior employee I have ever hired. But did my actual work back that up? Was I really directing AI, or had I just ...

Answer engine optimization, or AEO, sounds like another shiny acronym marketers are supposed to chase. I get the temptation to roll your eyes a little. SEO was already hard enough before AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and every other answer-shaped interface started changing how people ...

Leading a web design and development team can come with all sorts of challenges. The most common challenges come from two key areas. First, the competencies required to build a website are the broadest of all in the digital marketing space. Second, most agencies don’t treat web design and ...

A neighbor once asked if she could pick my brain about what it takes to move into web design and development. She was starting her degree program and still had a couple of years before she would enter the field, but she was smart to start asking the question early. I originally planned to answer ...

A hero banner is the large, high-visibility section at the top of a website page, usually combining a headline, supporting message, visual design, and a call-to-action. On a homepage, it is often the first real message a visitor sees after the navigation. That makes it more than a design element. ...

When your website feels fast, visitors stay longer, explore more pages, and are more likely to convert into leads or customers. Slow experiences drive people away before they ever see your offer. On the search side, Google’s guidance around Core Web Vitals makes it clear that real-world page ...

Redesigning your website can feel like a fresh start, but it is also one of the easiest ways to accidentally damage your search visibility. A new site can improve your brand, messaging, user experience, and conversion path. It can also erase valuable URLs, weaken internal links, remove content that ...

Your website can look fine and still underperform. That is the frustrating part. It can have a modern design, decent images, a working contact form, and all the usual pages while still failing to help visitors understand what you do, trust your expertise, and take the next step.

After building close to 300 websites by 2014, primarily in Drupal, I decided to introduce HubSpot to our agency and clients. HubSpot had already offered website-building capabilities for a number of years, but the 2013 rebrand of its website platform to the Content Optimization System introduced ...

I started dabbling in web development in 1996. That makes it about 30 years for me. My first WordPress site was in 2004, then I moved heavily into Drupal in 2007 because, at the time, it gave me the structure and flexibility I wanted for serious business websites.

I built my first website in 1996. You should have seen it. It was so not good. It was glorious in its mediocrity, though even that might be significantly generous.

When I started Tribute Media in 2007, I did not have the goal of building a web company that I could end up selling. I simply repurposed an old name for another company that failed and I just needed a company name to bill against. I just had one client that I was fulfilling for, so the name didn't ...

In November of 2022, ChatGPT 3.5 hit the world stage like a Mack truck. Of course, large language models had been available before then but access was fairly limited. ChatGPT 3.5 wasn't the first AI. We've had task specific AI models for many years prior to ChatGPT. In just 3 1/2 years, AI has come ...

Before starting Tribute Media, I worked as a sales manager for a local company. With my design and marketing background, the president asked me to create a brochure. I struggled because our client service was inconsistent, making it hard to write honestly.

When you consider your web presence, you may be thinking that if you build it, your clients will come. All too often I hear from clients, “I spent $10,000 on my web site and it is really pretty. Why are people not coming to my site?” There are many answers to why this might be but the easiest way ...

In October 2007, after losing a job, I founded Tribute Media with little more than grit and a friend's help. We had a shoestring budget, no dedicated marketing team, and I was learning on the fly—making mistakes that cost time and money. I was very fortunate that I had an external partner that ...