Did You Say What I Thought You Said?
So a customer dials up their designer/hosting company and says “I’d like to put a blog on my site.” If you’re the hosting company, what do you do?
- Provide a server specification and tell the customer that as long as it works with the system, it’s okay.
- Offer to set up the blog for them.
- Tell them you don’t support blogs, and request that the dreaded software is hosted elsewhere.
Yeah, you can bet that I’m writing about the clueless company that offered option 3 to our mutual customer last week. Which of course prompted a quick site review on my part where I found:
- The current site these guys provided is designed in frames. No one has designed using frames since before the turn of the millenium. No one…and there are valid reasons why not. Google and it’s robotic brethren have big trouble reading sites that use frames. Customers often have trouble navigating sites that use frames. I could go on…
- General design is old and out of date. We’ve become accustomed to seeing websites centered on our screen. If a website is flush left, and sized for 680 screen resolution, it’s going to scream to even the most rookie eye “Out of Date Site.”
- The site shows up in Google, but not as well as it should.
- Images instead of text – they’ve used images in the place of text for key drop quotes and headlines. They don’t use any alt text, which means that Google doesn’t get it.
That’s it…game over, thanks for playing. I check the designers portfolio, and even their recent launches have the same problems. It’s as though they’ve been on autopilot since 1999.
Okay folks, a reminder: take a look at your site or ask someone like me to look at it for you. If the site isn’t cutting it, you may be losing business.
Oh, did I mention the customer gets nearly 90% of their work via the website?