• by November 2, 2000

Hello from New Orleans. I'm here for the last two days of Thunder Lizard's Web Marketing 2000 show. Today and tomorrow will focus on online advertising (rather than marketing in general) so watch for my reports in the upcoming issues. But for now, if you decided to play it safe and avoid New Orleans' famous Bourbon Street on Halloween (like myself) - here's some highlights we missed.

On the first day of the show, which started Monday, according to Adele Bienvenu from Online Ads Discussion List (which does a good job reporting live from tradeshows), focused on testing. She wrote, "testing was the message here. Testing across multiple platforms, testing for all modem speeds, testing how functional your site is, and testing your online customer service." Tom Kuegler of Skyline Network Technologies, reportedly advised marketers keep it simple when it comes to design - "if it can be done without a plug- in, do it without one." So much for all the hype surrounding several recently launched rich media technologies.

The second day was kicked of by eMarketer's Chief StatsMaster Geoff Ramsey, who highlighted the differences in the statistics that are provided to us many major research companies and asked the question we've all been pondering in the last few weeks - "why don't any of them add up?" Ramsey's answer was, "different definitions, different methodology, and extrapolating, interpreting, and hypothesizing in the own unique way," Adele wrote. More importantly, we should all be thinking about the consumer, not the numbers - "WHO is buying, from where and how can I get them to my dot-com?"

On the second and third day, a lot of discussion focused on search engines and optimizing your site for better search engine placement. Rule of thumb - "be true to what your company does," Adele surmised, quoting Eric Ward, founder of NetPost and URLwire, who said, "traffic gotten by a high search ranking is useless if your site doesn't provide what the searcher is looking for."

Simple rules? Yes, so it doesn't seem we missed much, but these are the rules that are ignored much too often.