Buznutt Blue Sky Solutions

Thoughts about the web: What I think I know.

Don’t Let Your Site Suck

Web page, web site. Just stuff. You click and go. Go here, go there, fool around.

You see some things you like and lots of things you don’t. Some pages are so slow to load that you either go nuts or leave. One great example of this is “Alchemy Architects weeHouse” at http://weehouses.com/. When you go there (or try) you find that you get an extremely slow-loading page that ends up after a while showing a mostly white page having a small and meaningless picture of some kind in the middle, with the word “ENTER” down there beneath it.

Research has shown that most visitors to most web sites will give a new site four whole seconds before moving on. Yes, you did read that right. Four seconds.

So where do we go if we stay and then click on the word “ENTER”?

To a white page with three grayed-out images at its bottom. Above these is the warning that says “Clicking and still can’t get in? Get the latest Flash Player here:”, and provides a linked image to Adobe’s web site.

Now what about this is great? Well, not much at all about the web site. Try it. This is one of the best examples of how to drive customers away. See if you can figure out how to use it. Your results also depend on which browser you are using.

I happen to be interested in the product that these people sell. Just because. I haven’t bought a tiny house from Alchemy Architects or anyone else and probably never will, but I like the idea. In case you might be interested, try Tumbleweed Tiny Houses at http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/, which will give you a much better web experience.

Here’s the main idea though: web development is not easy or hard. That isn’t the point. Web development, like anything else, is hard to do excellently. To get it right you don’t just throw a lot of resources at it, whether those are money, or buckets of virtual paint, or time or staff or anything else. You sit down and think it through. It hurts.

First you decide what you would like to do, and then what you can do, and finally what you must do. Then you let those ideas fight. You sweat. You swear. You wave your arms around a whole lot and scream that it cannot be done. At all. Ever.

Then you find a way to do what you need to do with what you’ve got. And if you are a little lucky and a lot smart you do something genuinely appropriate and genuinely stunning and usable. And easy to maintain.

But this is not easy at all.

Genius is not required but it will not hurt. In case you haven’t noticed yet you don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner to live a long, happy, healthy, and productive life, and maybe it would even be a disadvantage. But smarts are not disqualifers. The point is to do smart things no matter how smart people think you actually are. Results count.

To get results takes experience and practice and paying attention. It also takes a lot of education. The web is still very young and requires a developer to continuously pay attention and learn something every single day. Every day someone finds a better way of doing the same old thing that transforms it from being the same old thing into something new.

Every day is also a moving target, so the cool thing you did last week may not be good enough any more. Even if it is, it may be getting stale.

This is a new kind of world. You are not running your business in the corner store anymore, even if you are. Even if you are, you are competing with everyone else in the world who is selling the same products and services, so you have to keep on your toes or your loyal customers will run right over the top of you to get to your competitor, who has suddenly learned how to provide more and better products at lower prices with better service.

So don’t build a sucky web site. Or pay someone to do it for you. Get it right. Even if it is hard to do. You deserve it.

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