First, ugly sites are often sites that were originally built back in the 1990s by some business owner who had no web design sense or technical knowledge but wanted to promote his business online. It was much more difficult back then to actually sell online (not many shopping cart scripts existed, and ones that did exist were very expensive). So the business owner didn’t just install a cart and sit back and wait for orders to roll in. Rather, he put valuable and unique content on his site. Over the years, he added and added and added more and more content, and garnered lots of link love, and now his site is very well aged and very well linked.

MacGregor has a content-rich, incredibly useful, but butt-ugly site.

The MacGregor Sailboatsite is a good example of this. It was built by Roger MacGregor himself, who designed the MacGregor sailboat and who owns MacGregor Yachts. It’s a horrible horrible site from the perspective of design, usability and navigation. It does all of that completely wrong. But it’s packed chockful of everything you ever wanted to know about the MacGregor, and MacGregor owners love that site.

Second, ugly sites are often sites that were built by hobbyists — people who are simply passionate about a topic, and started their site without any intention of making money from it. Before eBay, before CJ, before AdSense, these hobbyists were out there creating volumes of good content about their topic of interest.

They, like the business owner above, garnered lots of link love, and today have well-aged and well-linked sites. Perhaps they’ve added AdSense or affiliate links on their site, and now they realize some hefty income from their hobby site. It’s icing on the cake for them; they didn’t start the site to make money, and if the money dried up they would continue to maintain the site. They didn’t know or care about design, and they still don’t. But they offer some of the best resources for information about their hobby. Non-profit organizations often fall into this category too. A Page About Freemasonry is a good example of this type of site. It was created by a guy who is a Mason and who loves Masonry, and wanted to share information about it. The site is nothing special, design-wise, but it contains scads of good info about Masonry.

Third, ugly sites that are ecommerce sites are often built by small business owners who can’t or won’t pay a professional to build their site. They use whatever free software they can get their hands on, and they do it themselves. They care deeply about their business, but they have no clue about web site development.

These sites can do well because the owner’s personality and passion very often shine through loud and clear. People get a sense for how much the owner cares about his product and business, and so they trust the site enough to buy from it despite its lack of professionalism and design aesthetic. These sites are often created by business owners who are very active within the community of people who use their products — so they’re known within the industry, and people feel comfortable buying from them.

AmmoMan is a trusted source of ammunition in the gun community

AmmoMan is a good example of this type of site. My word! I would never deliberately design an ecommerce site to look like that! But lots of people who shoot know AmmoMan is a good place to buy ammunition, and lots of shooters have met the owner at various shoots and gun shows over the years.

So…. yes, ugly sites can do very well. But in my experience, whenever I’ve taken on a client with an ugly site and redesigned it, it did better than before. My redesign will typically also improve search engine crawlability, usability, navigation, etc., so it’s not an apples/apples comparison. But it provides evidence that ugliness, by itself, is neither required nor sufficient for a well-performing site. When ugly sites perform well, it’s typically not because of their ugliness but in spite of it. People are very forgiving of ugliness when the site gives them the information they couldn’t find anywhere else, or sells them the product they need at a better price than they can get anywhere else.

The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.

Years ago, there was a tourism campaign — I think it was sponsored by the Florida Tourism Bureau or some-such quasi-governmental agency. The tagline was “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.”

That campaign was pretty lame, and it was widely ridiculed and lampooned. This was during the 1980s drug-running heyday, and the “Rules” tourism campaign came to be associated with that. But the message about different rules could be applied to website development. “The Web: The Rules Are Different Here.”

I frequently see sites — and am sometimes asked by new clients for re-designs of sites — that were obviously designed/developed/coded by someone with a background in print design who hasn’t yet learned that the rules are different here.

They use huge graphics that take forever to load. They use rigid, inflexible designs that fall apart when you resize the text in your browser, or when you have a browser window that’s larger or smaller than the window the designer tested in when developing the site. They use drag-and-drop WYSINWYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get) software programs that write code that’s invalid, that displays improperly in some browsers, and that often makes use of javascript or Flash buttons for links — making those all-important links invisible to the search engines.

They don’t understand that the web is not a fixed canvas, like paper. They don’t understand that some of the most important types of visitors are search engines, which are essentially deaf and blind users with browsers that have neither Flash nor Javascript.

Many — probably most — print designers are perfectly capable of learning the “rules of the web” and how it’s different from print work. But all too many of them don’t.

But the web is now about 15 years old, and I wonder why so many newspapers still don’t manage to get some of the basic things right.

When?

This morning I was reading an article about a replica of the Nina coming to town. The Nina is coming to town on Monday. The article is listed in this morning’s edition (Wednesday, March 12) but under the headline there’s a line that says “Last updated March 11.” This suggests the article was first written and published sometime prior to March 11.

So when the article says the Nina is coming to town Monday, does it mean Monday two days ago, or Monday of next week, or some other Monday? If I go down to Fisherman’s Village today, will the Nina be there or not?

Perhaps “on Monday” was a sufficient identifier when newspapers were printed and distributed once a day. But “on Monday” is completely insufficient when articles live forever on the Internet, and when articles might be updated after their original publication date.

Please, sir, may I have a link?

Then I read another online newspaper. I found a link to the reader comments on the “most commented story.” The comments were interesting, but I really would have liked to read the actual story. Unfortunately, there was no link to the original story. Not even a publication date or a headline, which would at least have allowed me to search the archive to find the story.

Really, how hard is it to link to the original story from the comments? I learned how to do that back in 1996, within days of writing my first HTML tag.

Next up: Location, Location, Location

Then I was looking for some information on a certain event, and I found a newspaper’s web site which contained a story on the topic I was looking for. What I really needed to know was where this event was taking place. The newspaper article helpfully told me it was in the Marshall Civic Center, but there was no clue, anywhere on the page, as to what state the newspaper is in. Heck, I’m not even positive it’s in the U.S. I know the newspaper is the Marshall News Messenger. I can guess that the city is Marshall. The Marshall News Messenger tells me that Marshall had two fatal wrecks, and that Marshall is planning its inaugural “Third Saturday” event. But where is Marshall? Michigan? California? Florida? Maine? I have to go digging through the site to find out.

It’s common sense, not rocket science

The way some newspapers handle their online content, they might just as well make a giant pdf of each issue and upload that. What they do is no more usable than a giant pdf would be.

Web site usability is a growing and important topic of discussion among web developers. Usability can involve some finely nuanced tweaks, and also some very advanced technical things, and I can forgive any web site that doesn’t get some of the more advanced stuff right. But come on! Clearly identifying dates, and linking from article comments to the original article, are neither technically advanced nor finely nuanced. A reasonably intelligent sixth-grader should be able to figure out to do things like that.

Developing a new web site — or re-developing an old one, for that matter — typically involves consulting with the client to determine the site’s target audience and primary objective, creating an attractive and functional design, turning the design into properly coded, valid html, building out the pages of content, and writing the server-side programming to perform whatever dynamic features are needed. But there are several steps that are frequently overlooked before a site “goes live.”

A custom “404 not found” page should be created. At minimum, it should incorporate the site’s overall design and navigation links, and might also include a search form, links to the most popular sections of the site, and/or a way to contact the site owner or webmaster for assistance. And make sure that requests for non-existent pages actually get a “404 page not found” server response. If any other server response is returned — particularly a “200 OK” response — the site could easily become persona non grata in the search engines, among other problems.
A robots.txt file should be created to tell the search engine spiders what pages or parts of the site should not be spidered. Even if you want every page to be spidered, a robots.txt file should be placed in the document root of the site, so as to avoid filling up the site’s error logs with “not found” entries for a non-existent robots.txt. This makes it much easier to spot errors resulting from actual bad links when you examine the error logs.

A canonical URL redirect should be implemented to send all site traffic to your desired canonical URL — either www.example.com, or just example.com (without the www). Whichever you prefer, your should make sure that all traffic to the other form is redirected via a proper 301 redirect.

Test all forms and other interactive features. Submit every form. Attempt to submit forms without required information, or with invalid information. Try to break them. Try really really hard to break them. And make sure that whatever is supposed to be done after the form is submitted actually happens. If an e-mail is supposed to be sent to the site owner, test it, and make sure the owner gets that e-mail with all the appropriate information. If there’s a search engine, search for some things. If the site relies on cron jobs, set them up ahead of time, and make sure they’re running as scheduled and performing as expected.

Test all redirects and rewrites. If the site uses Apache’s mod_rewrite module to present search-engine-friendly URLs, test them all, and test the non-search-engine-friendly versions, to make sure that every bit of content can only be reached by one unique URL.

Check subdirectories for directory listings. Make sure that directory indexes are turned off, and/or for any subdirectory that doesn’t have an index page, plop one in there.

Test all internal links and all outgoing links. Make absolutely sure that every single link leads to the right place. We don’t need to stinkin’ dead links!

There’s simply no excuse for ever launching a site without having completed each of these steps.

Web sites need to contain good content. It doesn’t matter how many people “ooh” and “aah” over how pretty your site is. If visitors don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go elsewhere.

Web sites need to be functional and usable. If your site contains exactly what your visitors are looking for, but they can’t find it because of a random, incomplete, or incoherent navigational structure, they’ll go elsewhere. If visitors find what they’re looking for, but when they fill out your contact form and hit “submit” they get an incomprehensible error message, they’ll go elsewhere.

Web sites need to be spiderable by search engine spiders, so that they can be found. If your site is extremely functional and usable, and contains great content, but your potential clients/customers can’t find you when they search for your product or service, they’ll go elsewhere.

Each of these factors can — and do — have entire books written about them. And there’s much more. In this brief post I’ve barely touched on the essential components of an effective web site. The web site owner shouldn’t need to become an expert in all of these things. But the web site developer should absolutely have more than a passing familiarity with all of the aspects of effective web site development, or should work with people who do.

Every day I see web sites developed by so-called “professionals,” for paying clients, that don’t even come close. I see sites in which every single page is a giant sliced-up graphic exported in toto out of Photoshop. I see sites that use Flash for all internal site navigation. I see sites that use frames and iframes for all or most of the site’s primary content. I see sites that have the same title and description for every single page. I see sites that return a “200 OK” header instead of a “404 Not Found” for non-existent pages. I see sites with plenty of pretty pages but virtually no content. Sometimes I see all of these things in a single site!

Attention, web site owners, and those in need of web sites: Tropical Web Works is not the only web site development firm that can develop an effective, functional site for your business. But please bear these points in mind and ensure that whoever you do hire understands these basic concepts.