Your site design tells a lot about you as a company or organization. It may hint at the quality of your product documentation, your level of human customer support, the technical expertise of the employees at your company or organization, and even the technology and processes you use internally.
What are your tells?
Using a fixed-width site design
What this tells:
- Your web designers, and possibly much of your organization have displays that are too small.
- Your don’t care that customers buy expensive, large displays to help improve their web experience.
Short articles spread across multiple pages for no reason
What this tells:
- You are attempting to increase your ad exposure.
- You think visitors don’t know how to scroll down, or don’t like scrolling instead of loading new pages
- You haven’t though of people wanting to print an article in its entirety for offline reading, so you must not think very highly of your content.
New browser windows. Unexpected.
- You think for some reason the new page content will be unexpected, and deserves its own window.
- You haven’t noticed everyone on the planet blocks popup windows.
- Your web designers found a navigation problem they could solve by forcing all visitors to a new page.
- Link referral revenue is more important than web user experience.
Web-based support is clearly outsourced
- You aren’t the subject matter expert for your own product or service.
- You may have outsourced other core functions and done that poorly.
- Visitors can expect a longer support time lag if they have to contact support and it requires escalation
Break the back button
- Your organization doesn’t use the internet.
- You think the only place people want to visit on the internet is your site.
Requiring Registration or “Account Creation” for a non-obvious reason
- You don’t want to talk to visitors, so you hope no one will bother registering
- You want to sell visitor data.
- You aren’t interested in web site problems users may genuinely want to report to you.
Requiring a form at all and then requiring irrelevant or arbitrary information
- Your legacy backend database pukes its guts if the Salutation field is NULL.
- You don’t really want to talk to web visitors.
- A web visitor is likely to get junk mail from you, electronic or otherwise.
- Marketing wants this information and this is the only way they can get it.
Most of the content on your site is brand awareness.
- Your marketing and advertising division have too many people on the web design committee.
- You’ve never done tests with users to determine what they want when they visit your site.
- You have an ego. A big one.
- Users need not revisit later, as you will never fix this problem.
Password requirements for accounts are secret, until a user enters a bad password
- Your backend database has some strange field requirement
- You don’t get many IT security visitors.
- You haven’t looked at your web logs to see how many people enter bad passwords initially.
- You like irritating people.
Password requirements are arbitrary and strangely weak
- You have a bigger fraud prevention and detection budget than an R&D budget.
- Your legacy backed database is very old and breaks with long fields or special characters
Home page is blank unless scripting or Flash are enabled
- A Flash-based exploit is a good attack vector against your organization, your web site visitors, and your customers.
- You don’t use the internet much for finding information.
- What little internet you use, you don’t do over mobile devices.
- You have one web designer, they know Flash, and that’s it.
- You don’t care about search engines or people linking to pages on your site.
Every navigation link is a script, so bookmarks and other browser functions don’t work
- You think this is new and snazzy, not old and irritating.
- You don’t want anyone to link to your pages.
- Someone designed your web site, showed you how to update content, then left.
- Javascript exploits would be a good attack vector against users in your organization, as well as your web site visitors and customers.
No RSS
- Your web programmers are overworked.
- Your web designers “don’t get this RSS thing”
- You think your web visitors want to constantly visit your site for updates.
- You are interested in ad revenue from visits to your page.
- You think your users have too much time on their hands.
- You have an inflated notion of how important your site is.
Content for any single page is pulled from multiple sites and domains
- You’ve never done web site performance testing
- Link, ad and referral revenue is more important than content.
- You don’t use NoScript.
- You are a good candidate for getting your users pwned through an “affiliate”.
Contact requires passing some sort of “anti-bot” or “anti-spam” test.
- You think you are the only one who gets spam.
- You don’t mind making web visitors your own personal spam filter.
- You need to grow up and deal with spam and bot-generated information.
Putting Advertisements in Online Store
- You think “another ad can’t hurt”.
- You’ve don’t monitor user visit stats to see if people are abandoning your site before purchase.
- You care more about ad sales than product sales.
Putting Flash Animation Advertisements in Online Store
- You hate your customers and don’t want them to buy anything.
Using a Flash Animation to Show “site loading progress” that leads to a non-Flash page
- Your login process is way too slow
- You’ve never benchmarked this design decision to determine if it aids the login process.
Require a Proprietary Plugin or Application, that requires escalated privileges and maybe a system restart
- You have an over-inflated ego
- You have too much business, so you don’t mind driving any particular visitor away.
- You’ve never user-tested the whole process of installing this plugin
Requiring Windows-only Technology for your Site
- You don’t monitor laptop sales
- Your end product or service is likely to mimic the Windows user experience.
- Your R&D is about 18 mos behind the curve.
Only Supporting Web Browsers Many Months or Years Old
- You are staffed by luddites
- Your organization would be a good target for a well-known browser exploit.
- You don’t use the internet much.
Breaking Second Mouse Button/Right Clicking
- Someone high up on the web design team is a misguided control freak.
- You’ve never heard of NoScript.
- You like irritating non-technical people by breaking a browser function they thought they learned correctly.
Setting up a “web forum” in lieu of a traditional online support presence
- You have no support department, so you hope fairies, unicorns and fanboys will provide.
- User expections post-purchase = LOW.
Setting up a “web forum” for any reason at all
- You don’t actually have useful information to share, so you hope avatars, smilies, stickies and PMs will make a good substitute.
- You hope to attract a user base of pre-teens.
- Message threading is a “90’s technology” to you.
Forms Require Users to Enter and “Confirm” email address.
- Your web designers mainly copy other poorly designed sites.
- You are too lazy to actually confirm the email address.
- You don’t understand the fundamental reason for confirming text fields where the user entry is both masked and defined at the same time.
- You are in denial about the existence and use of the clipboard.
Can you solve all of these? Yes, but it takes work. You have to care about the impression you give people from your site design. Can you solve most very easily? Absolutely. Most of these can be fixed by one person in under a day on any web site.
