I review business websites on a regular basis and am continually surprised by the amount of "search engine unfriendly" and/or poorly designed sites I find. Many of these sites are advertised in the company's brochures, business cards, newspaper ads, etc.
I can quickly identify a poorly designed Website; one that is all frames, has a poor link structure, all flash, or other problems. The challenge becomes explaining to a business owner that their Website is horrible without offending them. I have also run across several advertised sites that were not even operational! What kind of message are you sending your customers? I am a tech savy client, if I have a choice between two different companies and one has a well designed site and the other doesn’t, which company do you think I am going to use?
Here is a quick list of the common problems I see with many small and medium sized business websites:
1. All Frames- It may be easier or cheaper to design your site this way, but it is a sure-fire way to get overlooked by the search engines (and therefore potential customers).
2. WYSIWYG- This stands for "What You See Is What You Get", and from a business standpoint, you aren't getting much. Programs like Frontpage & Dreamweaver are commonly used by the average office worker that wants to design the company's site. The problem- most of the time they don't fully understand what they are doing to the Website (I ran across a GoLive website today, and for those of you that know what that means...it leads me into my next point).
3. Never Updating your Site- If you know you're only going to make changes to your site once a decade, don't put the last time you updated the site on the front page (hit counters are also very 90's = outdated; you can find out how many people are going to your site without telling the whole world).
4. Over-use of Images- A good website is a combination of several different factors: coding, images, links, text, databases, and multimedia. Many companies will load their site down with poor pictures that take forever to load. Understand the search engines can only read the Alt Tag of the image.
5. Not Hiring a Professional- Every business owner would like to reduce expense, but this is an area that can cost you money if done incorrectly.
No honey, I don’t need to see the doctor about this, our son has been watching Grey’s Anatomy and ER, he can stitch me up and it will be just as good.
The Owner’s Son Handles the Website - To learn more about this author, visit James Wells's Website.
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