Is your current website doing more harm than good?

Tony Bartlett | Date:

Tuesday, 8 July 2008

There are many practices I see commonly employed by web designers and developers that I believe are counter-productive and often detrimental to the overall performance of the website.

A good corporate website should be thought of as a virtual extension of physical business premises.

Whether or not you actually sell your products or services online is irrelevant - visitors consider your website a 'virtual shop-front' that reflects your real-world business.

To form and support my opinions about good and bad web design I often compare web-based practices to their 'real-world' equivalent. I've outlined five of my 'favourites' and will leave it to you to make up your own mind.

Real World Scenario:
As a customer enters your shop you greet them with "Welcome, you are the 1624^th visitor to our shop since January 2005".

Website Scenario:
You publish a 'hit counter' on your website.

Comment:
Customers couldn't care less about how many other customers have entered your shop, especially if it relates to a handful of customers each day, so why publish a 'hit counter' on your website?

Hit counters were one of the very first 'interactive' features developed in the 1990's, but they have long past their use-by date. Of course meaningful statistics that allow website owners to analyse where visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your website and where they are going to is an essential component of pro-active website management, but these should be 'private' and not available to the public. If your website still contains a hit-counter I urge you to remove it immediately.

Real World Scenario:
As a customer enters your shop you greet them with "Welcome, everything you see here is exactly the same as it was three years and four months ago".

Website Scenario:
You publish the 'Date Updated' on your website - and don't update the content regularly.

Comment:
While IASP's business is built on providing content-driven corporate website solutions, I appreciate that not every website requires updating every day, however, if you do not update your website regularly (at least once a month) for goodness sake remove all references to the 'Date Updated' and stop telling the world that the content they are reading was published when Adam was a boy.

Real World Scenario:
As a customer enters your shop a band starts playing loud music that wakes up the baby in the pram the customer is pushing.

Website Scenario:
Your website automatically plays an audio/video file when visitors enters your website.

Comment:
When integrated correctly, audio/video can be powerful inclusions in a great corporate website, but you must consider the consequences of 'forcing' media onto visitors without first asking their permission.

Consider the fact that you have no control over the volume level a visitor has their local computer set to - and you have no way of knowing the environment they are in when visiting, for example they might have a baby sleeping in the next room, or they could be at work, and as soon as they open your home-page the baby wakes up (or the boss wakes up) and you can kiss that visitor goodbye forever.

If you use media files, give visitors the courtesy of turning them on - not the inconvenience of turning them off.

Real World Scenario:
Your advertising, marketing, signage etc. works well enough to encourage a customer to walk into the front door - but instead of walking into your shop, they walk into another 'front door'.

Website Scenario:
The dreaded 'Splash Page' - a page published at the front of your website that contains a message along the lines of 'click to enter'.

Comment:
Apart from a means of providing graphic designers with a way to demonstrate their creative flair (and increase the design budget of your website), I cannot think of a single positive reason that justifies publication of a 'Splash Page' on a corporate website.

Splash pages are nothing more than a barrier to visitors - and if produced in Flash as is often the case - they also render the website virtually invisible to search engines such as Google.

If your corporate website features a Flash Splash Page and you disagree with my opinion in this regard, please post a comment on this article (please include your website address) and I'll reply after looking at your website with my 'human' eyes and then with IASP's special 'electronic' eyes (which allow us to see a website the same way Google does).

Real World Scenario:
Customers enter your shop to see some products are available but many of the aisles are closed and marked with 'Under Construction' signs.

Website Scenario:
Same deal: 'Under Construction' published on pages within the website.

Comment:
A great corporate website should be a work in progress, and the content/functionality available on day one will in many cases be only a fraction of the content/functionality ultimately available.

There is no shame in conveying to visitors at one or more strategic locations within your website that future expansion/improvement is coming, but ideally clear timelines should also be published (and adhered to).

Over-use of 'Under Construction' is a common practice with static websites (static meaning the navigation structure would have to be modified on every page to remove a specific link from a navigation menu), but even if your website is static, I believe it is worth the effort to totally remove navigation links to 'future' content to avoid over-use of the 'Under Construction' phrase wherever possible.