Web programming/design crimes

Posted on | January 20, 2010 | No Comments

There are plenty of bad web designers and programmers out there — see the long-standing (14 years!) site www.webpagesthatsuck.com, and others.

In this day and age, though, where content (and google) are king, good design and execution are no longer enough.

At minimum, your website needs to have a content management system that allows you to quickly and easily updated content, without logging and carefully detailing the changes, then sending them over to your designer/programmer for them to make — and without an invoice as a result of them doing that for you.

I have an associate who is not very tech savvy, and runs a local retail operation providing one primary service/product. His work is impressive. Unfortunately, he was referred early on in his business to a company that specializes in relatively simple, quick, inexpensive websites — and it shows.

The site that he has is not particularly bad, but it is static, and the web design group expects him to come to them, checkbook in hand, whenever he wants to make any changes.

To me, it is highly arrogant of this firm to continue to approach web design in this way — they insist on force-fitting a particular solution onto their clients, refuse to keep up with the clear trend of providing content management capability with their sites, and ignore the obvious evolution of google and search engine optimization as the arbiters of what makes a successful site.

They ultimately are doing their clients a tremendous disservice, on multiple fronts — lack of control of their site, clear shortcomings when it comes to attracting traffic, bleeding them on an ongoing basis for site updates and maintenance that the clients should be able to do easily, and more.

If you are in a technology field, and you refuse to keep up with the evolution of that technology, you are clearly not able to provide the best, most up-to-date options and solutions for your customers.

That may seem incredibly obvious, but clearly, there are people/groups out there touting themselves as “website designers” who don’t have a clue, and are too lazy, or making too much money pulling the wool over tech-impaired prospects/clients eyes to care enough to stay up to date with their skills and mastery of their “craft.”

Is that a crime? Maybe not, but if an under-performing site keeps a business from winning the customers it needs, and becomes a financial drain, rather than a business development engine, it might be close.

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