This is relatively obvious. A quick gander upon the action sports industry tells the tale. Because I snapped a good photograph of the DVS Shoes buggy at the recent SNORE Battle At Primm off-road race and converted in into a desktop wallpaper, I was able to quantify name dropping the DVS Shoes brand into a magnet for action sports and automotive fans alike.
Yet, this is not the purpose of the post. I have been checking in on the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach in Australia. For my Rip Curl Pro surf fix, I've been clicking through several websites for the latest photos and videos of the event. Among them are the Rip Curl Pro Live website as well as the DVS Shoes website. Transworld Surf is somewhere in the mix as well.
One thing that has caught my attention in recent months is the amount top level of action sports websites who make use of the gaudy web practices. The practices adversely affect search engine optimization (SEO) as well as branding by way of the search engine results pages (SERPs) but nevertheless serve as eye candy for action sports addicts.
Many of these websites make use of iframes. Often times these iframes contain static HTML pages of live events, which itself baffles me, and other times these pages possess php scripts that arrive by way of applications such as Wordpress or some other fast action content management system or blogging software. Coincidentally, while the landing pages are amazing works from their teams of graphic artists, these pages that are captured in iframes are often bland or are simply blank pages and feature no visual branding whatsoever. None of the embedded photos are branded. Graphics are often non existent.
What really strikes a question mark regarding the use of iframes is that many of these iframe pages possess formidable page rank and are quite high on the search engine results pages. From a brand marketing perspective, I find this mind boggling.
These pages are blank slates of data, receiving a formidable amount of web visitors as well inbound links and have no analtyics embedded in the page to track the woes of their way. They have merely missed the mark.
Either the marketing directors are not well versed in or simply not addressing the search engines aspect of their marketing campaigns or those who support the web marketing campaigns are not fully conveying or have no clue as to the importance of proper landing page deployment in the game of web marketing.
Amid one of slickest design pages I frequently navigate through on behalf of a client is the NOS Energy Drink website. While they have since placed a Java Script safe guard to prohibit website visitors and search engines from bleeding through to the bland pages, the NOS Energy Drink website had long suffered from the aforementioned loophole in its web effort. But there are an array of others. The DVS Shoes website, while not as bad as the early NOS Energy Drink website, it certainly has its issues.