This is part one of a two part series looking at unfortunate mishaps commonly seen on websites. Here are a few things that will guarantee that your site sucks. Avoid these and you’re headed in the right direction.
1. Cheesy Stock Photography
Please stop with the ridiculous stock photography. Business websites and blogs are notorious for the terribly predictable (and absurdly cheesy) stock photo on every page or post. Why? What on earth do you think you’re gaining from that cheesy stock photo? In reality, all you’re doing is hurting your own credibility. How can a bad stock photo represent your brand?
I realize not everyone has the budget to hire a photographer or a staff of designers (I’m lucky to be surrounded by talented designers to call on). However, anyone can pick up a digital camera and snap a few shots. And yes, sometimes you do need to use stock photos. Sometimes tastefully chosen stock photos make sense, but bad stock photos are never a good idea. Search with a careful eye, there are shots available that aren’t cheesy. So, next time you’re tempted to talk about how you’re ‘King of The Jungle’ in your industry and show a lion, don’t.
2. Two Year Old News
Do you have news from 2008 in your ‘Recent News’ section? If so, you might as well tell visitors to your site that you really haven’t done anything worth talking about the last couple years. This is like me walking into a meeting and telling someone I don’t have work samples because we haven’t really done anything worth showing the last couple years.
When you’re building your site, think long and hard whether you’ll keep a news section updated. If the honest answer is no, leave the news off and you’ll be happy you did so in a year. Build a site that fits your business’ resources, staff and tendencies.
3. Abuse of the WYSIWYG
We preach Content Management Systems (CMS) to all of our clients. However, we’ve carefully built brand management steps into our CMS to ensure that multi-member management teams don’t fall victim to WYSIWYG abuse syndrome. WYSIWYG is simply a term referring to ‘What You See Is What You Get’ Content Management Systems. The trouble hits when people begin going crazy with bold, italics, underlining, color, fonts and just about anything else they can change from page to page. The problem is magnified when multiple staff members are tasked with managing one website with a WYSIWYG. If everyone is allowed to do things their way and every page is different, there is no consistent content progression from page to page. Your website becomes a huge mess.
Tasteful use of a WYSIWYG can be fine. Just remember that sometimes less can be more on a website. Additionally, if you emphasize everything, you’ve successfully emphasized nothing.
In part two, we’ll look at three more common errors. In the mean time, please share common errors you see.
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Lions, WYSIWYGs and yesterdays news, nice post Andrew. A lacking news section can kill the best of sites… I agree that it should be avoided if you are not going to keep it updated. Stock photography is tricky because it is so easy… and in most cases cheap. However those diamonds… even well shot lions can be found, unfortunately they are usually hiding 30-40 pages into your search. Be diligent and don’t settle on the lame-o-stock-photo!
The glorious image search. That’s always fun!
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