My Branding

101 things NOT to do on your website

With the prevalence of free services, code, hosting and WYSIWYG web creators it is easy to try and stuff your website with every new thing you find - below are some tips on what to avoid

* Autoplay music/noise/sounds. These can be an extremely useful tool if deployed effectively, but an extreme annoyance if they are not. I recently visited a website that had a service that I...

* Flash intros. These things are almost useless. The search engines can see virtually none of your content (there are workarounds for this, but why workaround if you can avoid?). Most of your...

* Flash loops. These are the fancy banners and boxes that you see with constantly playing info in them. The first time you watch it it may well be of interest, but if your visitor spends any time...

* Animated gifs. Used well these are positively great. Used badly and they are the same as flash loops.

* Colour clashes. Pink on yellow for example - if you can't read it without eyestrain why force your visitors to?

* Pop ups. If you need pop ups then why not let the visitor decide to click a link to invoke the pop up? If you absolutely MUST have a pop up ad or similar then at least use tracking cookies to...

* Disabling the right click. There are plenty of scripts out there to do this (there is even one to download on our site), but why would you want to upset your customers that way? In Internet...

* Disable the back button in the browser. I make it a point NEVER to revisit a site that does this to me. It took me 3years to go back to Amazon when they had this turned on for a short while. ...

* HUGE text. Blimey...I'm getting old - not blind.

* tiny text. Blimey - I must be getting old....

* Spelling mistakes. Now, in this day and age very few spelling mistakes are forgiveable. We all have spellcheck on our systems - we just need to take the trouble to use them. If you have pages full...

* Broken links. There are few things more irritating than thinking you have found what you have been looking for only to be stymied at the last hurdle by clicking the link and getting a error page,...

* Open each new link in a new window. New windows should only open when your visitor is leaving your site. If you open a new window with each link you will quickly fill their browser tabs with...

* Poor or non-existent navigation bars/menus. These are the bane of many sites. If your site has poor navigation then customers will never find the elements that you wnat them to. Keep it tidy -...

* Sites that do not work in XYZ Browsers or need certain resolutions. 'Designed for ***' actually reads as 'Couldn't be bothered to make it work for everyone'. Most people are aware that Internet...

* MASSIVE and lengthy online forms. Look - if people want to contact you then make it easy. We do NOT need to know their home addres, telephone number, number of lovers in their lifetime and their...

* Horizontal scrolling on a 17inch monitor. OK - I am lucky. I am sat here typing this looking at a 19screens screen. Most people have 17inch screens. I hate having to scroll horizontally because...

* Pointless image popups. When your visitors click on an image - if it pops that image up then the image should be BIGGER than the one they clicked. It is pointless and VERY frustrating to find...

These annoyances are all easily avoided, but amazingly we see plenty of so called 'web consultants' who still employ some or all of these. Go look at your website. How many of these can you find? ...

Feed created by Richard Brown at http://mybranding.info

Which is best: Custom development or modified web site template?

The Internet is increasingly gaining the attention of senior managers in all sorts of divisions of virually any size company, and yet there is a continuing battle for supremacy between those web...

Answers to this question are as numerous as the people that you ask; depending on the parameters given and understood. So - given the same parameters and the two options (there are a few more - but...

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So, Option 1: Budget is absolutely no restraint and you want to wow the world with something that they have never seen before. You decide that your company and what it does is so critical to the...

* You can specify EXACTLY what you want - colo(u)rs, spelling, font types, transitions, highlighting, pictures, interactivity, technology, etc

* Every part of your company can have its own unique identity and resources within the website

* You should get EXACTLY what you specify

* Future development of any of the code should at least be accessible - after all....you wrote it!

BUT (and there are some big buts here my friend!)

* Budget really has to be no constraint. Remember - if no one has done before what you want to do now then it is going to cost - just ask NASA

* Most of what you are asking for here can be delivered in the template modification method below

* You are going to be reliant on the people that write the code for you, still being around when you need them again - you aren't going to be able to search the internet for a solution to most of...

* And finally - businesses are about making money. Spend a fraction of what the custom development would cost on a modified template design (which as you can see below is unlikely to look like...

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So then, Option 2:

You know just how important it is to have a good quality website to act as a communication and commercial interaction on the web for your customers, but you don't want to break the company doing it. ...

* Picking a "look and feel" for your web entity will be a whole lot easier if you can say - 'change the font, colo(u)rs, pictures and the logo and it will look great - rather than having to offer...

* Web templates are either free, or low cost

* Most templates only do the basics - but these basics can save tens of man hours and so slash development cost

* As you are not spending the money on look and feel (the templates pretty much all basically 'work'), you can use some of that saved money to add really useful extra features that truly WILL give...

* If you ever need to have a similar site the transition will be much cheaper than replicating a custom build

* Custom builds take time - lots! Templates are typically much quicker to implement

If you ever need to make changes in the future there are countless people who can help you

So in conclusion?

Well, you pays your money and takes your choice. But if advice is what you want, we STRONGLY recommend that unless you are a multi-billionaire, or there is REALLY no technology out there that can do...

Feed created by Richard Brown at http://mybranding.info

Online Consultants are a ripoff

Most online consultants want to try and make their trade as inpenetrable as possible so that they can continue to charge high fees for mediocre work. There is an increasing trend toward creating FUD...

Let's be honest. Getting a succesful website online and running is tough. There are hundreds of things that need to be done, and each month there is a task list of dozens of items to keep it going...

Good online consultants want to have a long term and mutually profitable relationship with their clients. If both parties are doing well from the relationship there is no reason why this should not...

A company near us (we'll call them Teachalot) need a website, with a password protected customer area, some way of allowing people to download a training syllabus, and a pretty template that they can...

Web template - well there are plenty of these online that are freely given away, but let us say that we just HAD to get someone to make one for us and they charged us GPB300.

Contact script for website - tons of these freely available online - but let's say for arguement we pay someone GBP50

Password protection - this can be done for free with the .htaccess file or by downloading some script - but we will pay someone GBP50 to make the script work

File downloads - well this is just putting links to the files on the server - so no charge

Website writing and development - not that big a job, they only want 40 or so pages for now, so lets say we pay someone, GBP50 per page, that totals at GBP2000

So if we total all of that we get to a grand total of:

GBP2400. So how is it that Teachalot's quote was just short of GBP25000? Simple - the company quoting believed that they were the only one doing so and that they had convinced Teachalot's Board of...

Advice if you want advice is simple. Talk to more than one company. Don't believe anyone until you are properly convinced. And don't part with all of the money until you get what you paid for.

Or just email us!

Feed created by Richard Brown at http://mybranding.info