As I'm working through the editorial proofs for our upcoming magazine, I have the unenviable task of verifying the contact info for every company that's credited on the featured projects. My first stop in most cases is Google, in hopes of tracking down a professional company website with complete contact information.
Believe it or not, not every company has made it a priority to establish such a website. (Thankfully, the primary offenders here are not companies in our industry, but rather their project partners.)
After browsing something like 50 websites over the past week or so, many of which feature a few key common threads of badness, I feel prepared to launch a crusade against these common offenses.
I'm no web designer, or anything-designer, but as a user, here are a few things I feel qualified to say should be fireable offenses if you catch your web designer trying to implement them:
Flash Intros: Come on, just get to it. If you're so hip and modern and have such great aesthetic sensibilities, demonstrate it by implementing a user-friendly web design, not by dropping a 15-second roadblock in the middle of my path to your company's primary public interface.
Incomplete or Nonexistent Contact Info: At a minimum, give me a phone number and a (monitored) email address. Physical address is a bonus. I've spent the past five minutes browsing through a very pretty website (behind a Flash intro wall!) that has no contact information. Whatsoever. Just one of those nifty "Contact Us" forms. Which leads me to...
Unmonitored "Contact Us" Forms: You know, those lead-retrieval forms where you type in your email address and a brief message and click "send", only to have your note sent through a wormhole and delivered into the same alternate universe where mismatched socks are dispatched to, never to be seen by a human being again. Has anyone ever gotten a meaningful response after using those forms? Not me. Unless you count the time I tried to schedule a massage appointment through one. No response, but when I called the spa three days later to try again, the receptionist did say, "Oh, you're the one who emailed us...?"
Comic Sans ANYTHING: Maybe, mercifully, someday, future editions of MS Office and other such suites will quietly retire Comic Sans from their lineup of system fonts. Until that day, we are stuck with legions of Geocities-level websites displaying grating Comic Sans, employed by people who shouldn't have the power to determine what fonts users and clients have to read, all because it looks "friendly" or "fun" or something (?). My fave today was the website of a professional construction company that yells at me in bold, all-caps Comic Sans, offset by some delightful bold Monotype Corsiva. Yes indeed. Of course, all of these things so far are better than...
No Website At All: It's 2010. 'Nuff said.
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I'm sure there's plenty more, but these seem to be the most consistent offenses. I'm baffled that so many business owners today overlook the importance of having a simple, findable, navigable, informative website. From my perspective as a Gen-Y-er who barely remembers a time before the Internet (okay, AOL for the first few years), if a company is not on the web, that company does not exist.
So if you spot these issues on your own company website and want to fire your web designer and throw me some money to make it better...well, I've exhuasted the whole of my expertise on this blog post, so, anyway.
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