Rosemary has developed a fun branding quiz dealing which car make is like your personal brand. Well, the whole process of developing a web site for your business can be a confusing and frustrating proposition, just like buying a used car can be, especially if you’re not an ASE certified mechanic.

Finding a web developer can be more treacherous than buying a used car. Imagine walking onto a car dealer’s lot and seeing thousands of different cars. Some of the cars are sleek and beautiful, some are clunky and ugly. The difference between our imaginary car lot and hiring a web developer is there is no way to test drive a web site before you buy.

Imagine the frustration you’d feel if someone told you that some of the most beautiful cars on the lot do not have a fully functioning engine. These cars only look good sitting still. They’ll never be able to make the trip out of your drive way because they lack a functioning engine. It’s one thing to take a chance on a used car when you’ve been able drive it, imagine buying one without being able to take it on the road.

That’s what it’s like hiring a web developer. Because you can’t test drive a web site, you can’t know how well the web site actually works until after you’ve launched the site.

Unfortunately, while you would know the minute you put the key into the engine that the car you fell in love with doesn’t work, it can take YEARS for you to recognize that something is awry with your web site.

There are some problems which can be avoided in advance by looking “under the hood” of a web sites done by the web developer. However, just as very few car customers truly understand the inner workings of a gas combustion engine, very few web development customers understand the inner workings of coding. It’s difficult for the average person to know if something is coded properly or not by just looking at the code.

One simple test you can perform to “self diagnose” your web site is to enter your business name (or your name) into Google. If your web site is more than 2 years old and you don’t come up in the first few pages, you have a problem.

Another simple test you can perform to “self diagnose” your web site is to use Mozilla Firefox as your browser instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can download Firefox for free from here: http://www.firefox.com

Here’s a web site that works well in Microsoft Internet Explorer, but fails miserably in Firefox.

http://www.30minutemall.com/

Since nearly 2 out of 10 web surfers are using non-Microsoft products to surf the web (expect this number to rise instead of fall), building a site that automatically turns away 20 percent of your visitors is like installing doors on your physical store which randomly locks the door for 2 out of ten people, keeping them from shopping at your store.

Finally, the third “self diagnostic” technique is to look at the very top of your computer screen when you’re visiting a page. At the site above, you’ll see it says “Welcome to THENOWMALL.com” The text displayed at the very top of the browser window is the text that resides in the title tags in the head of your HTML document (a.k.a. web page).

This information is among the most important information on the page. When the search engine spiders and bots arrive with notebooks in hand to record where to return pages on this site, the title tag is the first place they’ll look. The title tag for the site above is telling the search engines to place it in the category of “THENOWMALL.” This is ideal if your target customers are searching for the term “thenowmall” but if they’re searching for home delivery services, this site won’t make the list. (The only time delivery appears on the page is inside of an animated gif image, which the search engines can’t read.)

In the case of the web site above, the web site owners have to heavily promote their site by handing out business cards to every one they meet. The search engines aren’t driving any traffic to them so they have to bring every visitor to the website themselves. Then, when visitors arrive, unless they’re using Internet Explorer, (which statistically two out of ten won’t be) they’ll try to click on the links, find they don’t work and move on.

UGH!!!

Another web site owner learned that her web developer hadn’t paid any attention to title tags when her site was created 4 years ago. In the title tag was a cryptic set of letters and numbers: “ABCorp titlepage09/02-l”  (I’ve changed the numbers to protect the company’s identity.) After four years on the web, their customers still couldn’t’ find their business, even when they typed in the company name.  However, a search for ABCorp titlepage09/02-l had them ranked at #1. Too bad no one was searching for that term when they were looking for the web site.

The three self diagnostic tests above will tell you if you’ve purchased the web equivalent of a car without an engine.

Just as on our imaginary auto lot, where there are Junkers and there are Ferraris, there are pretty sites that aren’t performing and there are ugly sites that are doing surprisingly well. (Those ugly sites could do better with the human visitors with a design “face lift.” One such facelift resulted in a 450% increase in sales in a single quarter for one client site of mine.)

Being the owner of a beautiful web site that isn’t beautiful on the inside (the code) is just like owning a Ferrari that doesn’t have an engine. It doesn’t take many trips down the driveway on foot (past your parked Ferrari) before you start wishing that you’d bought one with a functioning engine.

That’s why I enjoy working with Rosemary so much, because together we create web sites that are beautiful inside and out. They work on many different levels.  They are visually appealing for the human visitors and they are equally appealing to the search engine spiders from a coding standpoint

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like me to run a "performance diagnostic" on your website.

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

http://www.virtualimpax.com
phone: 772.336.0441