Web Site Myths
In the modern world, a company without a web site is like an office without a telephone—you’re constantly out of touch. But there are many myths and misconceptions regarding the design process and unrealistic expectations about what a web site can and cannot do for a company. We can’t say we’ve heard them all, but we’ve heard more than a few, so herein are some of the ones we hear most frequently from our clients.
Thinking That Web Sites Are Just HTML
A Web page is an empty vessel filled with the rich content your customers want to see. Web technologies—HTML, tableless CSS, web page validation and XML, for example—will not now, or ever, replace compelling content.
Developing Effective Web Sites Is Easy
Not by a long shot. Creating a successful web site takes a mutual commitment—from the client and the designer—of time, resources, effort and patience.
Web Sites Can Be “Finished”
The Web is dynamic in nature, ever-changing and ever-growing. If your site doesn’t change and grow with it, you’ll be left behind. A static site—one with no regularly added content—gives users no reason to return; they’ve already seen everything you’ve got, so why bother?
Thinking Anyone Really Cares About Your Web Site
Users will only “care” about your site to the extent to which it helps them solve their problems or answer their questions about how the services you and your company provide can help them.
People Will Read Your Web Site Cover-to-Cover
With billions of pages of information available online, surfers skim rather than read your content. Yes, compelling content may help draw them in further, but designing your content with skimmers in mind will prove more effective in the long run.
Everything You See On The Web Is Free For The Taking
Not so much. Plagiarism is plagiarism, whether by copying an unattributed passage from a book or lifting a graphic or even an entire page from someone else’s web site.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes such practices dangerous to the health of your site (you can be removed from the major search engine’s indexes and your web host would rather shut down your site than run the risk of being accused of any sort of complicity) and expensive (copyright holders may charge you any dollar figure they like and it is guaranteed not to be cheap).
Your Web Site Defines Your Company
It’s more the other way round. Your company’s site should reinforce and amplify who you are and what you do. Defining your company through your web site is, plain and simple, a mistake.
Your Web Site Replaces Your Company’s Marketing Strategy
If you’ve already got a successful marketing plan in place, what makes you think replacing that strategy with a web site would be better? Hey, you think L. L. Bean stopped sending out catalogs when llbean.com went live?
Flash Has Any Practical Use Whatsoever
Let’s run it down—search engines cannot see anything written in Flash, the navigation of most of these sites is spotty at best and truthfully, the only people enchanted by a Flash applet’s possibilities are the people who create (and sell) them. For everyone else, they’re just annoying.
Worrying About Your Meta Tags
None of the search engines look at these any more; Google alone has a rotating portrait of every word and image, every line of code contained in the web pages it indexes, downloaded to their world-wide complex of massive server farms. Isn't it more useful to be found by any unique combination of words aon a page instead of dodgy old meta tags? (The answer is yes.)
People Like Sites That Force-Feed Them Multimedia
If you’re not a musician, why is your site pumping out music, uninvited?
Animated Gif’s Are “Cute”
No. Not ever. Not even once.
People Will Find Your Site The Instant It Goes Live
Not so much. It takes weeks and months and more for search engines to “find” just your front page—even when you draw ‘em a road map. In the interim, the people looking at your site are mostly you and your family. It may take Google several months just tof ind your first page; it could take years to get listed on DMOZ, according to several of their volunteers.
Web Sites Are Like Magazines Or Any Other Media
The Internet is an entirely new and different medium than any other, with the promise of direct interaction between you and your customers throughout the entire world. Is there another medium that can do that?
Nope.
Updated: November 18, 2005