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 In This Article
NEWSLETTERS | FEBRUARY, 2011 How to Do More (with Less) with Your Website By Christopher Butler Just after the end of the recession—in September, 2009—I wrote an article titled Doing More with Less about the various ways that you could continue to improve your website without spending much. Given what was happening in our economy, the topic seemed pertinent, if not downright obvious. After all, just because money was tight didn't mean that online business could shut down entirely. We needed to find ways to move forward that were within our means. But at that time, I had no idea that the recession had actually officially ended in June. I, along with the rest of America, had to wait until September, 2010—over a year later—to find that out from the National Bureau of Economic Research that the recession was over! Today, we've been clear of the recession for over a year and a half, and yet budgetary concerns have not gone away entirely. Our experience with the recession was chastening, and after an extended period of austerity, it doesn't seem like we're going to be returning to our days of big spending just yet. In fact, recent surveys in our industry show that one of the biggest challenges that agencies face in 2011 is an expectation to do more for their clients with less. On that note, the Creative Industry Outlook report released by FunctionFox for 2011 showed that 58% of respondents expected their firms to maintain their current size in the coming 12 months, yet 60% expect an increase in revenues compared with 2010. That sounds like the majority are expecting to do more this coming year, but not necessarily with more. But even if you don't share that outlook, my guess is that you'd still be interested in finding low-cost ways to get more value out of your website. Who wouldn't? So, with that, I'd like to share with you five different ways that you can do more with less with your website...  
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Thanks for another good post. Each of these hits on a different thing part of what maintaing a site is all about, thinking about how people use it, thinking about how the site can collect information from users, how people find the site, how you measure the site's success, and even how to create content. As far as list posts go, this one is diverse in all the right ways.
I'm really interested in the Smart Search. How does it work? Also, in agreement with Alex: You've got lots of good ideas here, as usual.
Alex: Thanks for reading and your comment. I'm glad you found it helpful!
Maggie: SmartSearch is definitely the coolest item on the list! I'm guessing the result is fairly easy to predict—you type in a search query and results start appearing beneath the field in real time as you type. Ideally, that's as visual an experience as possible. But behind the scenes, we try to identify a particular content set that the SmartSearch will be optimized for, though it will also perform a basic site-wide text search. Ideally, though, the idea of optimizing it for particular content allows for queries that match particular tags or categories (which may or may not be visible to site users) to retrieve more targeted results. That's exactly what's going on in the Brahmin.com example—where a user can type in "red tote" and get only red bags that are tote style. Make sense?