Online First Impressions

In high school I worked at a major pizza chain. It was a fun, fast-paced job. My sole responsibility was answering phones and taking and ringing up orders. I always had my eye on actually making the pizzas, but alas that dream was never realized. I was informed that I was too good at answering phones to pull me away. I really think that was code for “We know how clumsy and accident-prone you are and do not trust you to put together a pizza without setting the building on fire.” In retrospect, that was probably a smart choice. A year or two later when I got yet another pizza-shop job — this time an independent shop — it was the same story. I was stranded at the counter. So instead I perfected my phone etiquette and people skills. Both of those are valuable assets that I employ every day at DDA.

While I do still believe that they weren’t confident in my pizza-making abilities, I did and still do take great pride and care in how I present myself and the businesses for which I’m employed so I believe there was some truth in their statement as well. How you’re clients, customers, or patients perceive your company is very important. First impressions do matter and what they are seeing, hearing, or experiencing on their first encounter can have a lasting impact.

In today’s digital age, websites often become a person’s first encounter with a company. It’s like the equivalent of a customer service representative, which is why I’m surprised that so many companies still treat their online presence as a second thought. When we develop a website, we have a list of 12 key items that are considered during the development process. This includes everything from the website design to the navigation system and menu to corporate identity and marketing messages to the content and keywords used. All of these pieces are vital to ensuring that a website is not only strong enough to drive in traffic, but that it’s also good enough to retain the attention of visitors.

With DDA’s full range of interactive and traditional marketing services, we can implement just about any technology, such as video production, animations, custom programming, continuing medical education (CME) components, and more, to make a site more robust, more interesting, and more engaging.

Perhaps if I had worked at the pizza place in a time when the Internet was more universal I could have switched to pizza-making  because then we would’ve had the website to make some of those first impressions for me.

Entry by: toni