Web Design News

Unbelievably bad so it seems.

For a small web design business like Copy Text Online business can be generated at some unusual times and events. This last weekend Toni and I hosted a surprise party for Toni’s parents to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and now we’re working on two websites for people who attended the party.

One is for Toni’s sister who runs a bricks-and-mortar business and has had a website associated with the business online for four or five years. The site has never performed anywhere near their expectations, it’s never ranked in the first 10 pages for any important search term, nothing but the index page is currently appearing in Google and traffic numbers are tiny.

She and her husband asked us to take a look at it and it was immediately obvious why their site was doing so poorly. Our report to them covered five pages but the important points were:

• All navigation was via Flash buttons – there was no sitemap.
• The index page consisted of one small Flash banner with an embedded ‘enter’link’ and no text so no search engine spider could find its way inside.
• There were broken links and some navigation buttons only appeared at the bottom of several internal pages.
• The site used frames.
• There was a complete lack of sales text, there were no calls to action and the site failed to give surfers the street address of the business (The products offered by the business could not be sold online and customers needed to visit the business to complete their purchase).
• Keywords and keyword phrases were also missing.

Now you wouldn’t design a site that lacked all those essentials now would you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Web Design Worst Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.