How Not to Build and Market Your Website
Yep, that’s right – I said how NOT to build your website. You’ve probably all read dozens of posts, articles, columns and even other blogs on what you should do to sign and market your site on the web.
Well, on webpagesthatsuck.com I found a striking example of a site that’s doing essentially everything wrong. Wrong navigation, wrong design and layout, wrong colours, wrong formatting and wrong search engine optimization. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong that I was able to come up with a 5 reasons (immediately) this site should be removed from the internet.
The site is http://www.5safepoints.com/. As far as I can tell, it’s a site about the Virginia Driver Improvement Program Academy. I digress though, so here are the 5 reasons to revoke their drivers license for the information highway and put them on an e-bike in the middle of a field where they can’t hurt anyone.
Reason One: Mystery Meat Navigation.
Do I click on the images? The links? Which links do I click on? Some links take me to an external site, some open new pages in new windows, sometime the red underlined text is a link, sometimes it isn’t.
What they should have done
If you want to use a colour other than the standard blue or your hyperlinks, do two things. 1st, make all of your links follow the same behaviour across your website. Second, don’t use that style for any other content. If you links are green and underlined, don’t use that anywhere else. Place your navigation in normal areas, in the header, the footer and the sidebar. Randomly placed links will confuse people.
Reason Two: Unless you’re a competent animator, don’t use animation.
Close one eye and turn your head to the left before you visit this page, viewing it in anything other than your peripheral will probably burn your retinas. More mystery meat navigation and a horrible glowing .gif on their header.
What they should have done
Ditch the glowing header image, go with a Google calendar or third party scheduling service.
Reason Three: Talk to the hand, better yet – don’t talk at all.
Webpages that talk to me are the worst of the worst. If I want to hear someone talk, I’ll go to ted.com. Worse yet is that there’s no actual point to the talking and it’s obviously not a human voice. Some sort of speech synthesis module was used to make the voice say “thank you, click on a link to view and print directions”, just in case I wasn’t able to glean that tidbit when I clicked on the link that said “driving directions”.
What they should have done.
Just put the address with a link to the map. Everything I see on this site makes me think of using a samurai sword to cut a slice of cheese. Total overkill.
Reason Four: Hidden keywords are soooooooooooo 2001.
What? They’re using hidden keywords? Gasp! I’m always suspicious when I see a lot of unnecessary whitespace. They had a lot, I mean a lot. Sure enough, if you do a bit of clicking and dragging at the bottom of the page, the answer to the question of too much whitespace becomes all too apparent.
These folks have managed to cram in a full 1677 keyphrases into the whitespace of their site. I can imagine the difficult time they must have checking ranks for all 1600+ of those phrases. I even did a search for “23690 Yorktown 757″ to see where they come up. Not in the first 50 results though, hmmm. I so wanted to know more about that address.
What they should have done
This is a no-brainer. They should have not stuffed their page with invisible keywords. They should use real content to build value for clients and get those words off the page.
Reason Five: Naming pages “Page Title” isn’t doing anything for SEO.
They should stop it, they obviously know what keywords they want to target, as they’ve stuffed them into every site that they’re associated with. And yet, they have pages (like the FAQ) that have a title of ‘Page Title’.
Give or take, Google reports about a million competing pages for the term ‘page title’.
What they should have done.
They should have taken some keywords from here to use in their title tag. There’s plenty to go around, I saw a few hundred cloaked in the bottom of the page.
Given time, I could come up with at least a dozen more reasons to slam this site, but I think you get the idea. People like me, and you, will not just judge a web site but an entire business by how they represent themselves on the web. Think about it, do these folks seem professional? Ethical? Not to me, and based on my interaction with their web site, I wouldn’t go near them with a ten foot length of Cat5.
For more horrible examples of web design gone wrong, visit webpagesthatsuck.com