Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004
Part 1 of The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 is up on Vince Flander’s web design site WebPagesThatSuck.com. The site is reverse psychology in spades.
1. Believing people care about you and your web site. Vince aptly posts a photo of three giggling women looking at a laptop. Why are they giggling? Because you proudly launched a boring piece of brochureware. When they’re done having their laughs, the women are going to buy from your competitor. Interestingly enough, a similar scene played out on my office PC screen this past week.
I received an email from a credit card processing company wanting to exchange links. The marketing person exclaimed how they would increase my traffic and the link would raise my employers standing in the search engines. Yada-yada-yada. Either he hadn’t checked my Google standings or was ignoring them. My employer “virtually owns” the keywords “Arkansas small business” and our site gets over 30,000 visitors each month.
The email said the company had already linked to my employer. Fair enough. Let’s take a look. Well, the site is not Arkansas based in any way, so a link in the Arkansas Small Business Directory which lists 1400 Arkansas small busineses is out. The credit card site was in English, so a link in our new Spanish-language directorywas also out.
Then all that was left was our trove of the 500 Internet resources for small businesses. To qualify, a site must offer truely valuable information to a small business. Unfortunately, the credit card site was a “What’s In It For Me (WII-FM)” site. I emailed our regrets at not listing the company.
Monday morning brings an email asking me to reconsider. Being plain spoken as per my biography, I bluntly wrote that, “Your site is brochureware. It’s boring. Fix it.” If the baby is ugly I’llbe the first to mention it. Not one to identify problems wiithout a solution, I offered some suggestions for additional content that would improve the site. We’ll see if he gets the message or continues to press for a link exchange.
There over 8 billion pages out there and we’re to be impressed with five? So the rule stands - no one cares aout your web site.
You’ll have to visit Vince to read about Mystery Meat Navigation, the Man from Mars, and Mythical Belief. I look forward to Part 2.
