Welcome to the new City Parks Alliance website! Over the past nine months, City Parks Alliance staff, board members, and our web firm Social Driver have worked to reimagine our digital presence to bring CPA’s mission to the forefront and better serve our members.

You’ve invested the time and effort to craft a solid sales message and marketing campaign. The offer is great, the price is right, and people should be flocking in your doors and email inboxes to purchase. You’ve even paid a company to help get your website to rank in the top five of Google’s search results page, and your site’s traffic has soared as a result. But somehow, the sales aren’t rolling in.

Turns out, ranking #1 in Google doesn’t directly get you sales. Helping people does.

With the advent of voice-activated personal assistants like Google Home and Alexa, people are searching differently than they ever have. On the flip side, Google is returning results differently than it always has. This is big news for firms who value their search traffic and the value it brings to lead generation efforts.

We’re starting to see Google is giving less and less credit to sites for their great content, at some times even taking content as its own and featuring it as a snippet above search results. Rand Fishkin, SEO master and founder of Moz , calls this Google’s “Trojan Horsing.” 1 For some sites that follow Google’s rules, soldiers are hopping out to steal their traffic (take a look at Weather.com’s data below).

You don’t need Millennials to tell you that mobile sites matter. Mobile usage is slowly taking over desktop, and there are no signs of slowing down. Just this year, we saw the scales significantly tip towards mobile, taking 51% of the digital media time pie, compared to a 42% share for desktop. Some best practices from desktop web design carry over to mobile principles, but it would be a mistake to treat them as the same animal. As Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled, said, “Don’t build things differently; build different things.”

Compelling, fullscreen images currently dominate the web design world. It’s about filling the page with stunning photography, digital art, animated gifs, or cinematic video. Top that off with a single word or line of text that conveys a brand’s message. It’s an epic, cinematic look that’s all about aesthetic. Even the page navigation is often hidden or reduced to a small sidebar or icon. Essentially, this is your elevator pitch simplified into one punch. 

We’ve all been there. Your team creates an amazing marketing piece or package, and users aren’t biting. They’re not opening it, posting, retweeting, or contacting you. The content is great, but the time investment just isn’t paying off.

Where is the value to the consumer? Are we meeting him in his terms? What he wants to see and when he wants to see it? Let’s make this about him, and less about patting ourselves on the back for how often we can post or email.