The Cover Sometimes Sells the Book
It’s one thing for a Mom & Pop business, non-profit on a shoestring or even a small completely offline company to have obviously outdated, terrible websites.
It’s another for just about any other business taking themselves seriously, in the year 2007, to have a poor web presence.
However, it absolutely baffles me when a company that actually sells technology has a poor website. It’s just inexcusable.
Right Now
Right now I’m in the middle of working on a fairly large project. I’m not sure how much detail I can go into, so let’s just say it’s a pretty decent contract for whoever gets it.
We’re doing some research on possible companies to send out the RFP to, and of course turned to the web to find potential candidates.
And we cannot get over how absolutely terrible most of the websites are that we come across.
Sound Familiar?
I’m sure you can picture it now: group of generically attractive people dressed in suits, covering all the major ethnicities, happily smiling at you in their perfectly diverse professional world.
Light Blue on Lighter Blue on Light Grey on Grey on White color pallette; pixellated, distorted logo because they used a poorly resized JPEG instead of a GIF or PNG.
Clunky DHTML dropdowns, text-as-images, broken layout tables (or worse, Frames), and a Flash-for-the-sake-of-Flash snazzy animation to make it “pop.”
And don’t get me started on the copy.
Your Bad Website is Costing You Business
So far, at least two companies we’ve looked at have been ruled out based solely on how bad their website is.
Seriously, I’m not trying to sell you a new website here— Your company may just have lost out on a sizable amount of money because of how poor your website is.
It is happening right now!
Think about it— If you don’t care enough to keep your website current, why would we get the impression that you can build us a complex, functioning system that meets our needs and the needs of our users?
You can write all the paragraphs you want telling me how you’re a “Global action-oriented forward-thinking solutions driven comprehensive metrix-based software producer for enterprise level people focused organizations competing in vertical markets.”
But I’m going with the company that actually knows enough about current technology to actually implement it.
But if you don’t want to listen to me about the importance of modern web design— Ask Target how it’s working out for them.
It’s pretty amazing the amount web pro companies who have horrific, even hideous websites. I understand that the agency game is a busy business, and there’s not always a lot of time for the personal website. But by not updating your agency website frequently you’re showing an understanding of technology 5 years ago. Things change a lot in 5 years.
This was an issue I had with the agency I used to work for. They did great web work, but their website hadn’t been updated in ages and was an all flash mess. Is that really what you want to show your clients?
→ beth · 17/10/07 09:58 AM · #
Well said. Keeping a site updated is a mindset, not something you do ever 3 or 4 years. Heck, I feel guilty cause it’s been more than 2 weeks since I posted to my blog.
@Beth, we had a similar situation at my last job, bulky flash site that wasn’t doing us any favors. We would get started on a site redesign every few months but it would just die because the ideas behind it were to grandiose. We settled on a simple one page site that we could post a couple samples on and we could easily skin by just dropping in a new stylesheet. It kinda worked after a few iterations the site became an unwieldy one page monster of a site, but that’s another story for another day.
→ Brad · 17/10/07 12:18 PM · #
@Brad— You aren’t kidding, I just took a look and 2.6mb for a web page is ridiculous.
What’s even more ridiculous is that video with audio that starts playing automatically (nice cameo there btw :)) that startled the crap out of me.
But what’s hilarious is that they don’t even rank #1 for their company name on Google. Ouch
★ brendan · 17/10/07 12:56 PM · #
Brendan, that was going to be my new tagline. I guess I’ll have to stick with “Redesigning your company’s site to synergize with your organization’s paradigm shift. We help make your web presence more actionable.”
Yeah, that’s it.
→ Brad Dielman · 19/10/07 01:35 AM · #
Brad I’ll write all your ad copy for you. You’ll sound so cutting edge and important you’ll even wear a suit to the bathroom
★ brendan · 26/10/07 12:35 PM · #
I’ve been trying to put together a list of preferred vendors who can build sites for university departments that don’t have Web staff. It’s been a challenge; the state of the industry is appalling. Aside from the fact that 90% of the sites don’t validate (major errors, not minor typos), they have awkward navigational structures, bells and whistles in lieu of solid content, and jargon and doublespeak where their real content should be. I even found a site once that had a secondary menu hidden in the banner graphics. If you didn’t mouse over some colored circles by accident you would never have known a menu was there! I just can’t recommend companies that won’t even try to learn how to do things properly.
→ Heidi Cool · 31/10/07 02:49 PM · #
I know, I’m not sure what’s worse— refusing to keep current with modern web development practices or being completely oblivious to the fact that the techniques used to build websites have actually evolved since 1999.
★ brendan · 02/11/07 12:18 PM · #