You’ll have noticed the new website design for the MMD site which went live over the weekend.  I hope you like it – we’re really pleased with it!

It was an interesting experience for us (and for me in particular) to be on the other side of the fence as the ‘client’ rather than the supplier.  It helped me appreciate the difficulty of creating a website that serves as the very first experience that potential clients will have with your business and the importance of getting it right.  Not that we didn’t appreciate that before, but now that I’ve had first hand experience of the emotional energy that you have to put into it and the continual uncertainty of whether you’re going in the right direction or not, it just emphasises the importance of continually sharing our experiences and expertise with our clients and continually supporting and assuring them.

Having said all that, having a talented team to work with helps.  Tim is fantastic at taking a brief and turning it into something that looks great and does just what you need.  I’m constantly surprised by how often he gets it right first time and how few changes are needed to get to the finished product.  The most common response from clients after seeing the first draft is “Looks great!”

We’re also focusing on making our blog much more of a fantastic resource for our clients and followers.  To that end I’m absolutely thrilled that Tadeusz Szewczyk (better know as Tad Chef) has agreed to be one of our guest authors.  Well known in SEO circles (I first interacted with him back in 2007) he’s a prolific author, always insightful and produces posts of the highest quality.  I’m hugely excited to have him working with us and I look forward to him sharing his insights with us – make sure you’re subscribed to our RSS feed and following us on Twitter.  You can see his first post for us here (and it’s a cracker!): 30 Web Trends of 2013: How Web Design, UX, Blogging, Content, SEO Changes

The term “guest blog post” is, for me, a bit tainted since everyone is firing off guest blog posts in the hope of getting decent value links for them and their clients.  I’m not interested in that – I’m interested in getting the very best quality content in front of our readers and creating a superb resource to help you improve your website and your business.  However, guest blog posts absolutely have their place since they give a fantastic diversity of opinion and insight than – much more than a single blogger can.

So if you’re a gifted author with incredible insights that you think people would like to read then perhaps you’d like to be a guest author on this blog?  If so, please send me a few examples of your work and a brief paragraph about what you’d like to write about and we’ll get back to you.

I don’t intend for our blog to just cover SEO as it did in the past. Far from it – SEO should be just one tool in your marketing toolbox so expect posts covering all areas of marketing your business online.  If there are any topics that you’d like to see covered then please leave a comment for me and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

Finally – be sure to subscribe to our Twitter feed, where we’ll be sharing the most useful content out there on the web and our newsletter, which will have exclusive content not available on the blog or website.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that I’m still absolutely hopeless at finding decent images for my blog posts.  For example, I’m finding it impossible trying to find an image that’s applicable to this post. So what I’m going to do is just find a photo that I find attractive (probably from Flickr) and then use that.  So even if it’s not relevant then at least it’ll be pretty.  And I’ll try to choose one that you can interpret somehow – like the one on this post – what do you think was going through my head when I chose this?

* Creative Common image by Franco Folini