Do not underestimate your website!
Have you ever doubted the power of your website? Despite the fact that I have been in this business for many years now I had never seen such convincing proof of the value and persuasiveness of a website until an old acquaintance contacted me for some advice.
I have spent many years in promotion and sales allied activities and have certainly been immersed in the skill of marketing and developed quite a few successful web sites and did so with certainty and without doubts about the value of this vehicle.
My old friend, the CEO of a significant organisation, had been searching for a candidate to fill a most senior position in this organisation. Having finally found the right individual he was absolutely shattered to have his offer declined. The reason? The candidate had found their web site to be totally uninspiring and had by that judgment also judged the whole organisation. So much so that he felt his own status and reputation jeopardised if he joined it.
The question to me was what could be done to rectify the situation as they had only recently adopted a new design that, judging by the complexity and content of the site, would not have been cheap? The designer was operating a type of consultancy business aimed at fostering business growth and solving operational problems for smaller companies. So what could be wrong? As is usually the case, very few people have the knowledge to judge the effectiveness of a web design.
A quick look at the web site produced two answers; one was a matter of graphic skills and marketing knowhow, the other a lack of coding ability. A well known CMS software package had been used to generate the overall design. I hasten to add that there are a number of such systems and the better know ones certainly are very well designed and structured. So much so that many major sites use these packages as development aids but under the guidance of capable coding and graphic experts.
I have spoken of these before when dealing with the question of DIY editing of web sites. The best known CMS systems such as Drupal, Word Press and Joomla are excellent and well documented. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages but are extensive and well designed.
The obvious advantage is that they are template based and all you effectively have to do is to fill in the boxes to very quickly generate a plausible web page or site. To make life as simple as possible the packages are free and all you have to do is upload them to your hosting server and away you go. Many ISPs actually make the systems available pre-loaded so all you have to do is provide the content and upload it. All this is menu driven making it very simple indeed!
And that is exactly what my friend’s web site was, a large number of filled in boxes with little thought to layout, search engines, server rules, graphics and importantly human appeal!
Understanding the limitations or quirkiness of the templated code, or rather the lack of it, also limited the site’s functionality. The huge disadvantage of these proprietary styled codes makes it tricky to alter or expand the base design. Substantial knowledge is required for that task.
I am reminded of my own younger years. I learned a lot about preparing a meal and now am reasonably proficient in the kitchen. Yet despite having watched a favourite aunt produce some spectacular cakes and pastries I cannot, for the life of me, reproduce her achievements. That is what skill is!
The worst part of this tale is that to rehash the now inbuilt errors would be almost more expensive that to start afresh. The solution was to offer a new landing page that would rectify many short comings but would not create a new site. The result would be akin to providing a dust jacket to a book and leaving the book untouched.
Amazingly, this friend had just gone before a similar problem was brought to me by a client. He had decided to redesign his own site to comply with the new requirement to be responsive to all mobile devices. I must say I was impressed by his bravery to tackle such a problem but again a CMS package had been used. Not only that but he had actually managed to achieve that aim except his rankings had crashed to almost non existent.
I am not trying to disparage or belittle anyone but to date I have not found one single client who has successfully managed to edit or modify their own sites and do so without major problems or faults. Back to my aunt’s cakes.
In this case he had become confused with the name of the template file and how to rename them to make the navigation system work. What was not understood was that servers had trigger files. If you go to a web site you only specify the URL which does not contain a file name. The browser automatically looks for a file either called ‘index’ or ‘default’ to trigger the server load the web site.
My client had called everything ‘index’ and to prevent the server from a melt down had placed these files in directories called by the file names of old. That means he had an index file under a directory called ‘rates’ , ‘features’ and so on. An innovative solution perhaps which however made his site much slower to navigate and jeopardised his rating. Since he was paying for his own time rectification did not become expensive. It never-the-less was very time consuming and cost him some unnecessary downtime which may have cost him some business.
So once again we have seen very real examples of “horses for courses” or aunties for pastries. As I have suggested in the past: spend your time on what you are meant to do and that is to drive your business. Leave specialised work to the experts much the same way as you fix your own washing machines.
Call in the repair man, it is cheaper in the long run.
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