Digital Marketing is not just digital content, and marketing. It’s information technology (IT) – and any good digital marketing firm will also be expert in the underlying Internet-centric technologies that actually enable digital marketing. Both programming and IT architecture(s).
Very often, clients come to us with difficult IT challenges, that get in the way of standard, best practice digital marketing activities. We spend quite a lot of time dealing with these, in order to get the results we and our clients expect. IT architecture is our specialty, something most online marketing, pr, digital publishing and web design firms do not provide.
For example, a recent client re-hosted their website – from a custom platform, to WordPress, but all managed and hosted by another firm. We analyzed and asked for 301-redirects, to preserve Google page-rankings – an IT configuration usually required to be performed by the web hosting provider.
It turns out, the webserver was Microsoft IIS, and the configuration + programming approach proposed to create the 301-redirects, as explained by the hosting provider, would cost many hours and thousands of dollars. Not expected, and certainly not as easy and cost-effective as typical websites using Apache’s open source HTTP server.
What to do? Here’s the answer we provided our client – this alternative approach and dialogue is something you may need to do as well, with an experienced IT architect/engineer – if faced with an inexplicable IT challenge and cost, that stands between you and digital marketing success.
Answer:
When faced with an IT update that might seem to be high cost in terms of time, money and risk, many organizations will seek an “analysis of alternatives” – basically, evaluate different ways of accomplishing the same goal. The goal itself might need to be constrained or “phased” in some way.
Note that, in our opinion, it’s absolutely essential to maintain the Google Page Ranking of “X” for the Home Page, and at very least, the Page Rankings of “Y” for the very top-level, primary service pages (that are converting for your primary keywords right now).
If, right now, the cost, risk, time, maintainability and method proposed is entirely reasonable from a business perspective, move forward. In this case, “cost” is probably the variable to consider most closely; the proposed approach appears (right now) low risk, gets done in a few days and appears supported by programming experience. Future changes will continue to be costly, however.
Read on for alternatives.
In this case, the infrastructure that’s currently running the site doesn’t appear to be a “standard” implementation, and may include a lot of back-end customization. We don’t have the details, as we’re not hosting the site.
“Standard” web server implementations around the world for millions of smaller sites like this tend to be easy and cost-effective to change (and very often use common “open source” software like Apache, vs. Microsoft). If they’re not, and changes are required often, this generally requires attention.
But – we don’t know the extent of customization of the web server for this site, nor do we know the technical approach being proposed by XYZ for the 301-redirects. It may be absolutely required, or it may simply be one way to do it.
Therefore, something to consider would be to get additional quotes, an “analysis of alternatives” (AoA; a standard practice in Government procurement and acquisition).
The objective of the alternative quotes, would be (A) to solve the problem with no business impact, (B) at lowest cost, risk and time, and (C) implement in a way to avoid future costs, risks and issues.
We assume that the site will continue to need a good deal of additional updates and enhancements, and that this change needs to occur in the next few weeks.
Therefore, these are “alternatives” we can offer – ordered according to our recommendation. (Note that we bring decades of Information Technology, Architecture and Programming experience to the table, along with many options for labor rates and availability.)
1 – Alternate Hosting Quote – Provide a quote for replacing the Microsoft IIS web server infrastructure and hosting configuration, with another – and thereby enabling a more standard method for 301-redirects and other recurring, common webserver configurations. We would propose Apache HTTP Server in a standard, managed hosting environment.
2 – Alternate Solution Quote – Provide a wholly separate quote for accomplishing the task, in the same environment (possibly in a different way than proposed right now); but we’d again need all necessary information and/or access to the environment configuration and setup.
3 – Approach Consultation – Get an “outside” (i.e. our team) 2nd opinion and provide an alternate quote regarding the specific programming method and activities proposed in this email – but we’d need full access (or information shared) regarding the environment configuration, setup and implementation plan from XYZ.
4 – Alternate Method Quote – Simply review the programming approach being quoted, and have our programmers and architects work with the XYZ programmers to determine if alternate methods can be used and implemented (by them).