Ryan VanZan's Web Design Articles and Rants

Because if your website sucks, you suck (or at least that's what your potential customers will assume). Your website is the first representation of yourself, your business, or whatever, by which many people will judge you. I know it's harsh, you might be a really nice guy or gal who just happens to have a website that sucks. But the people out in Internet Land don't know that - all they know is that your website sucks, so you must suck too.

I have called upon countless prospects who had horrible websites, expecting them to be so grateful to me for offering to give their internet self a makeover, only to be let down by some nasally, uptight sounding secretary telling me that they "already have someone taking care of that" for them. "Are you kidding me!? Have you seen your website? Do you have any idea who I am?" are just a few of the things that run through my mind, but I haven't said any of them yet. Maybe my sales techniques are off a bit. Maybe I should say those things, well not the last one. I feel sorry for these helplessly ignorant, maybe colorblind (or just blind) people. They must not be aware of what is wrong with their website.

So here is my "Your website sucks if..." list of a few indicators for a bad website:

Your website sucks if...

• An IT guy designed it.
• A print-ad designer designed or coded it.
• It was built with Microsoft's "award winning" tool FrontPage.
• It was built with Microsoft Word (please tell me that wasn't you!)
• You have a visible hit counter (is this still 1992?!)
• You have to scroll sideways to see the rest of the content.
• Your text is actually an image of text.
• It was cheap.

So, let me explain. IT guys, print-ad designers, FrontPage users, and Word users are all examples of people who do not have the background to design an effective website. Sure, IT guys know a lot about network security, but what design background does he have? He spends his days thinking about firewalls and looking at source code. Print-ad designers design print-ads, not websites. Print-ads and websites have different purposes, goals, and design needs. FrontPage was somewhat popular among amateurs and IT guys in the early 90's. So if your website was built that long ago you might as well drive to work on your donkey. Hit counters are also a throw-back of the infancy of the internet. Professional looking websites that aren't ebay listings should NEVER have a hit counter - it makes your website look like a kid built it!

Scrolling sideways to see all of the content on a website is a pain in the ass. If your web designer didn't know that, he was not a good designer. Text should never be trapped in an image. It was invented to be free so we can resize it if our display resolution is too high, or so we can copy and paste it into our book reports, or so blind people can have it automatically read to them (that's not a joke, blind people can and do use the internet). Finally, if your website designer was not skilled enough and didn't have enough expertise to charge a fair amount for his services, you should not have hired him in the first place. Shame on you for cutting corners and making me suffer through looking at your crappy website!

Labels: crappy, donkey, horrible, suck, web design, websites, Your website sucks if