Nothing says “incompetence” like a webpage that is either under construction for a long period of time or has functions that do not work.

This is not an issue limited to small business and organizations. A few years back I was looking for an agency and one name kept being recommended.  They are a huge agency with major clients. I took a look at their website and they had several pages under construction. I revisited the site a week later, and then another week after that, the same pages were still under construction. Needless to say I never called them. If a marketing agency cannot fix their own website they must not be all that good.

This year I started to get healthy and was looking into to joining a gym. Since this gym is a national brand they only have a national website. Some of the functions on their website just didn’t work. In fact, the main response forms to get new clients had huge errors. Again, I went back weeks later and the issue still was not fixed. They missed a lot of business!

Recently I helped an organization fix some really important functions on their website. The issues were main features that were being marketed, and one seriously hindered the eCommerce usability, yet the issues went unnoticed!

TEST TEST TEST and then go back and test frequently to make sure everything is working correctly. Also, get another person to do your testing. Humans make mistakes and any good quality control procedure involves more then one knowledgeable person to proof and test. Set a schedule where you go back and test everything periodically to make sure there are no dead links and everything is working correctly.

People will and do judge you by your web presence. I once read a study that said a person who is looking for a new church will visit 12 church websites before they make a decision on which one to visit. Thing is, most everyone will judge your website in only a few seconds. Just look at your website stats and you will see that on average, 70% of traffic to your site stays less then 30 seconds. A good website should be constantly evolving as the organization changes. If you don’t have fresh content frequently people are not going to return. Maybe even more importantly, when people find an error on your site, they are not going to take the time to inform you about it! They just click to the next site and might never come back!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Internet, Just Me, Managment, Marketing, Media, Ministry, My Big Mouth, Remarkable, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.