Things that make you go hmmmm. . .

I've been doing a lot of competitor searches for clients lately and I've come across websites that just . . . make you want to go "hmmmm . . ." Thought I would share a few of these with you to serve as reminders that your website is being visited by real people. Do Unto Others - right?

• Why does a butcher shop need a photo gallery? I'm just sayin'
  
  
  
• It's called website DESIGN for a reason - no need to cause your visitor to have a seizure with bright flashing colors that force you to look away. That's the worst of the many undesirable design techniques in use.
  
  

• How does a customer contact you when there is no phone number at all, no address, nothing on the website?
  
  
  
• Is it really necessary to launch music whenever a visitor comes to your site - without asking them first? Can you say "send me the earplugs please!"
  
  

• Why would a company want to use images for normal text instead of just straight text? Search engines like plain text better.
  
  

• Are we still assuming that EVERYONE is using the same browser? Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, Safari - guess they don't care if the website is completely destroyed in IE6 or doesn't function in Chrome.
  
  

• What is with the small fonts? Maybe they don't expect that anyone would want to read the text so it doesn't matter . . .
  
  

• And what is with the light gray text on white backgrounds? Better hope that the visitor's screens are set to high contrast or they see nothing.

If you're curious and want to know the address of some of the "losers" n this list send me a note. If you've come across other things that make you go hmmm, please share them below!

Back to Work!

Well let's get the most important fact out of the way; today is my birthday! Teajai has ordered me to take tomorrow (Friday, April 1st) off. I half expect to get a phone call tomorrow morning from Teajai saying "Hey I really need you to come in after all." Then 10 minutes later her calling back LOLing and yelling "APRIL FOOLS! SUCKER!".

I'll let you guys know how that turns out.

On to other less important stuff. We're busy! There's tons of work being done, and to be done. It seems to me like a lot of companies are doing some Spring cleaning and getting their websites updated (or revamped). It's a lot of fun, we're cranking out some really creative & effective stuff.

We've got a new sales woman. Cari has been working with Teajai for the past couple weeks getting ready to start hitting the proverbial pavement and finding out who else needs our services and just don't know it yet.

We are consolidating our domains & will be able to more effectively administrate our hosted sites. I'm really excited for this, means a lot less logging in and out of servers & more time getting what I need to get done, done. On that note I want to encourage any web developers out there who host their clients to check their disk space usage! We had a client who was using 20 gigabytes (yeah, twenty thousand four-hundred eighty megabytes) of space on ONE EMAIL ACCOUNT. It was ridiculous!

Teajai keeps prodding me to post more updates, and after posting this blog I realized I actually kind of enjoy it.. I may have to start doing it more often. Until then I have to wrap up some other work before I leave for the week. Take care guys!