Website Wednesday + Marketing Thursday: Sweat the small stuff Akron

Update: This has been corrected.

Welcome to Akron, where spelling doesn’t count. This week for website Wednesday and Marketing Thursday (I have to take the day off for Turkey Day) I’m going to point you to the Downtown Akron website and its glaring spelling error. The Homepage if fine, but for the “Do Downtown” portion of the site Downtown is spelled Downtow in all of the Title Tags - yikes. That may seem like a small mistake to you (though I wouldn’t stand for it, ever) but it becomes more important when you consider that the “Do Downtown” portion of the site is the likely the main draw. Many downtown businesses are listed on that part of the site, and the pages do fairly well in Search Results… so it’s not just in the title of the page that shows at the top of the browser - it’s in the search results (I know my technical readers will be familiar with that concept, that’s for the less techno-savvy readers). Googling Downtow Akron will give you a good idea of the real problem.

Worse, today the Akron Beacon Journal is promoting this website as the first step in the plan of the new head of the Downtown Akron Partnership.

I like a lot of what the city has done to revitalize itself, I like the “Do Downtown” concept - but you have to hit on all cylinders if you want to earn respect.