Eye Spy… countless mistakes on your website

You’ve invested in a new website. You engaged a (hopefully) reputable agency to manage the project and provide technical expertise. Your team has committed a good proportion of the past two-to-four months populating the new site with updated and fresh content. You’ve started dreaming about meta tags, permalinks, widgets and plugins.

Don’t go live until someone with fresh eyes has given your site a final review.

Why? Because you’ve inevitably missed a bunch of things and made more than a handful of mistakes – many obvious, some important.

For example, a niche Australian law firm just launched a new website. Out of curiosity, I took a look. Aside from the uninspiring design (there’s little reason for visitors to linger and less to entice visitors to return), the things I noticed include:

BRANDING

  • The firm is inconsistent in the way it abbreviates its name – a basic branding error.

SECURITY

  • The site does not have a security (SSL) certificate.
  • There’s no privacy policy, only a weak disclaimer.
  • The contact form does not use an anti-spam feature (captcha).

FUNCTIONALITY

  • There are no related or most popular posts to encourage visitors to explore.
  • Likewise, it’s missing obvious internal page links.
  • Many external links open in the same window, directing visitors away from the site.
  • The sitemap doesn’t match the site structure.
  • There are 16 broken links on the site.

USER EXPERIENCE

  • There’s no capacity to engage with content. You can’t socially share, like, print, comment on or save blog posts.
  • There’s no media contact.
  • Fundamental functionality – such as the ability to filter content by category, sector, date or author – has been overlooked or is broken.
  • There’s no capacity to subscribe to the firm’s content.
  • The website’s copy contains countless spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors.
  • Profile (CV) pages do not permit you to connect via LinkedIn, or to download a virtual business card.

I could go on.

Your website is your most valuable digital asset. Make the right impression right away. Budget for a fresh eyes review.

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