A Text File Website Could Be Better

Oh man, oh man, oh man…

Since Thursday last week I have been doing some research on small business websites. I have looked at about 300 so far. Some of you reading this may own one of the sites I visited. I sent a few emails to site owners where I saw quick fixes.

Some of the sites though, maybe I should say many of the sites, were just plain horrible. I don’t really know how to explain this other than, I simply have a headache from looking at them. In the past you have probably seen those lists by other bloggers or webmasters where they list the worst sites ever. Well after doing my bit of research some of those worst sites ever were better than the ones I have seen over the past few days.

Best Described as a Collage

Many of the sites, I will refrain from pointing them out, could only be best described as a collages. Random thoughts, things they remembered, or important items they believed should be on their company website. Reasoning on placement or using a standard site wide template is thrown out the door.

I found music loading sites, animated bugs crawling on the screen, broken forms, you name it, I found it. Reminder here, these are on websites owned by small business owners who are actually trying to make a living at what they do. Animated bugs on a business website is like putting silly string in a brochure. Unless your a joke shop, don’t do it.

Here are some common errors I found on the small business sites I looked at:

• Home page, not titled
• Home page titled Home – Don’t do it!
• Music, music, music…. – Again, don’t do it!
• Contact form that didn’t work
• Contact pages that didn’t load!
• Lots and lots of formatting issues – See paragraph following this list.
• Indiscriminate use font styles, colors, and sizes with no consideration of consistency
• Lack of call to action or site purpose.
• Over use of center aligned text and content
• Supreme over use of justify aligned content
• Too much text without headers
• and the list goes on….

Lots and lots of formatting issues was the item that really bothered me though. Many of those items I listed are little things, things that could easily be overlooked, and easily corrected. The formatting, or lack of a real template issue was really just beyond belief. Many of the sites I had visited would have been improved if they had been converted to a simple text file that had no HTML at all. Then, at least a visitor could just read the content from left to right one line at a time.

Making a visitors eyes bounce around from left to bottom, to top, to left, to right, to, well it’s about as hard as following this sentence. Make your site an easy read from top to bottom.

A Simple Template

So here is my advice to you small business owners that are out to save a buck or two, and want to develop your own company website. When you are ready to start developing it, think: same design on every page. Use the same header on all of your pages, the same menu, the same footer. Make sure your content aligns vertically, make sure you use simple colors (and limit their numbers), and certainly keep music out of the picture. When you are done you can get my analysis to make sure your site is nice and tight. You don’t have to have the worlds fanciest website to help your business. You just need a professional appearing one, and site wide consistency is one of the easiest ways to do that.

You can also check out my checklist for small business websites, and make sure you are at least covering the basics with your content.