Before I take on a client I always go out and establish a baseline for their current web presence. Some of these wonderful people, with good companies have websites that are NOT SO GOOD. At the time they had their site built it was only because everybody kept telling them “You need to have a website”. If it was built in the late 90’s or early 2000’s most business owners did not realize their website could become the hub of their business someday.
The whole point of my social media business is to make people aware of the companies I work with elevate their web presence. My whole purpose is to get the general public to know, like and trust my clients. I do that by driving traffaic to their web site using blogs, tweets, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn. If someone hires me to perform social media work for their company and they have a poorly functioning website, it would seem to defeat the whole purpose of my work.
Before I go on much further, I want to state that MOST of my customers have good sites, built with precision and care by someone like the Website Design Team at Social Cindy. They are state of the art and subtle, sites that I love am comfortable sending people to.
For those sites that are not quite so good, I solve the problem by building a blog with a static page, which can make their blog look and function more like a website. I build multiple pages on their blog. Then put all the information people would normally get from a website on their blog site. I use social media to keep people on the blog site as much as possible and drive up the web presence that way.
I was feeling a little guilty for not liking some of these sites until I read this blog post today, on http://www.slate.com/id/2301228/
Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?
By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2011, at 6:14 PM ET
The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lis is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller’s autograph. That makes sense—when I’m choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is, Can the chef sign his name?
Wait a second, though. What does Chef Keller look like? You’re not going to bother with this place if the chef doesn’t have a good headshot. Good news! After the signature, the site fades into a snappy photo of Keller. Fortunately, he’s a looker—think Peter Fonda with Fabio’s hair.
After the autograph and headshot, the site transitions to a “main menu,” which presents you with links to Keller’s other restaurants and his PBS TV show. Tempted though you are, you stay focused and click for the San Francisco restaurant. One bit of advice: If you’ve got a subwoofer attached to your computer, now’s the time to crank it up, because you’re in for someauto-playing, royalty-free, ambient techno smooth jazz! As you stifle your urge to get up and dance, you click around in search of information about the restaurant. (The page emits a friendly beep every time you click.) If you spend the better part of your lunch hour scouring the site, you’ll eventually find the menu. What you won’t find is the price—it takes a Web search to determine that the tasting menu at Fleur de Lys costs $72 a person.
By this point, you’ve likely been so beaten down by the music, the nested menus, and the interminable “Loading …” prompts that you’re considering Taco Bell for dinner (though it too has a terrible site). Still, I’m not arguing that Hubert Keller is responsible for the worst restaurant website ever created. That’s a bit like trying to decide on the most awful serial killer in history. The head-poundingly awful Fleur de Lys site is just one of many in an industry whose collective crimes against Web design are as routine as they are horrific. “
A Website is meant to give people just enough information to make them contact you, via telephone, email, twitter, linkedin, or a comment on your blog. The information should be easy to find, there should be just enough pictures so that people can see your product, or your service, and unless it is a site for musicians, there really shouldn’t be music. Because you don’t want to lose Apple customers, there probably should not be Flash either, just sayin…
cindy fletcher
949.813.3860
cinfletch@gmail.com
