Why Do They Do It?
Posted On: 2007-06-12
There's a real lesson here for newbies - a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge at all.
Ok it's now Tuesday and the mayhem of the long weekend is just a memory. We had a surprise party here on Saturday night to celebrate my parents wedding anniversary and there were friends and relatives from all over the place. Some flew in from overseas, some flew in from interstate and some drove in and they all stayed for a couple of days but now ... they've all gone home, the mess is cleared up and we can get back to work.
It was certainly great seeing them all and my parents got the shock of their lives when they walked through the door and were confronted with 40 people they hadn't seen in some time ... but it was even nicer to see them all go. Surprisingly we actually ended up with two site design jobs out of the weekend so there was a hidden bonus in there for us.
One of the sites is brand new and to get good search engine placement we're going to be up against a whole lot of .gov and .edu sites that have published theoretical articles while the site we have to produce is focused on the practical aspects of the problem that my uncle deals with. It's going to be a challenge but that's something we enjoy.
The other site happened quite by accident when my sister and her husband overhead Steve talking to my uncle about his new site. My sister operates a bricks and mortar business down in Sydney and have had a website running in conjunction with the business for at least four or five years. The site has never performed to their expectations and they asked if we could take a look at it and give them an appraisal.
Well there's nothing quite like being given permission to rip an abysmal site to shreds.
After at least five years online here was a site that didn't rank for its keywords or keyword phrases. Even when you added the locality to the search string the site didn't appear and it should have because it's the only business of its type in that locality.
When we looked at the site it soon became obvious what the problems were and there are some lessons for newbies in what we found.
Navigation
All the navigation involved Flash images. Even the enter link from the splash page (yes they had a splash page) was embedded in a Flash banner so there was no way that any of the search engines could find their way beyond the splash page. No wonder that after four years or so the only page that we eventually found listed in Google was the splash page.
Most of the important links did appear down the left hand side of the page ... but once you got to the third page there were more important links displayed at the bottom of the page and that was several scrolls below the first fold.
Some of the important links were broken and there was no hint of a sitemap anywhere.
Text
There was no sales text on any of the pages. All that appeared on most of the internal pages was interminable lists of what my sister's business sold. There were no calls to action, no keywords or keyword phrases blended into the text ... just boring product lists.
The text was all in Times New Roman and it looked as boring as bat shit. There were no headings or sub-headings to break it up either. About the only thing that relieved the boredom though was when some of the text became unreadable because it appeared over parts of the background image that was way too bright and in your face.
There was no text on the splash page at all ... well nothing that had much relevance. There was a little bit of text that suggested that if you couldn't see the Flash banner at the top of the page then perhaps you needed to download the latest version but that was it.
Frames
Yep, the site used frames just to further confuse any search engine spider that somehow managed to stumble through the Flash entrance link. I'm not sure why they bothered to use frames because they really did serve no useful purpose but they did and they were suffering the consequences.
Images
The few product images that were used were rather boring too and they certainly didn't do much to enhance the sales potential of the site. In fact they almost looked as though they had been added as an afterthought.
There were plenty of other problems with the site too but those were the main ones and those problems should give you something to think about when your designing sites regardless of whether the sites are mainstream or adult.
So why did they do it? Why did they design a site like that? Well they didn't, instead of investing some money in the site and using the services of an experienced website designer they got their son to do it for them because he knew a little HTML.
And they wondered why their site wasn't performing!