Andrew Speakman

broken store finder page through multimap. performing a search by hitting enter instead of clicking the button gives old results or no results.

Loads of websites I see disappoint me.

They use clip art photos of smiley plastic people from strange angles, looking studious, sat in groups, or at a computer. A classic example of this can be found at www.train2gain.co.uk.

Keep it real.

I want to see the real people behind the company and the real customers doing real things. I’d rather have some slightly imperfect real photos than some obvious stock images.

Websites that use generic clip art images also tend to be lacking in substance. They are often designed and then left, without content being added to or updated. Some are even left incomplete with placeholder messages such as ‘Begin Content here’: www.bytewize.net/case_studies.php, or ‘This page is being updated’, or even the old favourite ‘Site under construction, please call back later’.

Don’t have a ‘latest news’ section on a business website unless you update it at least once a month! If your latest news is more than six months old your company can’t be doing that well, can it?

Make sure that all the links to other pages on your site actually link to pages and don’t generate nasty 404 errors. It’s really very easy to analyse your log files, any decent hosting provider should offer log analysis facilities. Regularly look through the logs for 404 errors with referrring pages, particularly those with referring pages on your site.

A website is for life, not just for christmas.

Google seems much slower to pick up changes to my scarcely visited sites than yahoo, msn or altavista. Maybe this is because of its more intelligent alogrithms detecting that I’m not very important and it not checking my sites much, or maybe it is that google doesn’t bother trying that hard. I am also much lower down google’s rankings than I am on the other search engines. Could it be that google is getting complacent?