I'm always amazed at how badly some Web sites perform. Here are two examples I found yesterday.
I visited the site of a national architecture/design firm that is well known. I could overlook the annoying Flash animation on the home page that made it virtually impossible to read anything (a product of the MTV generation, undoubtly, who believe that any image that remains on a screen for than ten seconds is "old fashioned"). But within two clicks, I found myself on a page that informed me that I was using an "antique" browser and that I needed to immediately upgrade to Explorer 6.0. Yes, the one that CERT, the national Internet security folks have said is a serious hazard that should not be used. It is supremely arrogant for a company to ridicule potential customers by telling them they have "antique" browsers (I was using the latest version of FireFox, which was released about three weeks ago--hardly "antique"). It costs almost nothing to design a Web site that works well on a variety of browsers. It is intellectually lazy not to do so, and from a business perspective, just plain foolish.
But wait--it gets better. This national firm also has a Web design division. When I clicked on that link, I was taken to the home page of one of these firms that buys up domain names and sits on them. Huh? You want me to hire you to do Web design but your own Web site link doesn't work? I'll pass on that.
We're moving a few blocks away next month, and I decided to see if I could DSL from Verizon. Verizon has finally adopted the strategy of most of the other phone companies, which is to price DSL at $30 to compete with the cable companies' Internet service, which tends to run $10-$15 more. I quickly got to a page that told me to enter my area code and phone number, and in a "few moments" it would tell me if I could get DSL service. I waited a "few moments," staring at a little blinking animation that was supposed to tell me something was happening. I gave up and went on to other work, but left the browser window open. About an hour later, I checked back....still blinking, still no indication of whether or not I could get DSL at the new house. Hmmm...think I'll stick with cable modem service a while longer.
How do your community, local government, and economic development Web sites rate? Do they work properly? Do they expect visitors to have a specific browser? Was the design last updated in 1998? Would you still be using paper brochures and documents that were last updated five or six years ago? If no, why are you doing so on your Web site? Who is delegated to check your Web site regularly to make sure that it still works? While doing some work for a client recently, I found that a little piece of software that had been installed to animate some pictures no longer worked on most browsers, and left an image on every subsequent page of the site, right in the middle of text and other images. No one at the company had ever checked recent browser versions against the site. It turned out the code was six years old, and was badly out of date.
On the Web, you get what you pay for. If you don't spend any time or money keeping your site fresh and up to date, you are not going to get the visitors or results you expect.