I just looked at a website today that was newly redesigned. It was an amazing visit into a time machine. This is what I found and what no one should EVER do to a website design if you want it to succeed in THIS day and age:

1. The front page was one big flash animation with all the links and what little text there was INSIDE the animation. Google says right in their webmaster guidelines that their spiders cannot yet follow links embedded in flash, and with NO keywords or keyphrases on the front page how can Google or any other search engine figure out where this goes in their index? Can we say SE-Death?
2. The entire sitewide page structure was changed. That means that all the pages the Search Engines have indexed in the past will now be 404s. Yes, I checked, there are no redirects. Can we say SE-Death?
3. Not only was the front page one big flash animation, but also the INTERIOR navigation throughout the site is now embedded in one flash animation, so even if the search engines were to follow a link from somewhere else into one of the interior pages they will be effectively dead ended there. Can we say SE-Death?
4. Tag soup and table structure! How 90’s! Not to mention how bloated . . .
5. The logo image is a link. You’d think it would be to a homepage, right? It wasn’t. It led instead to a custom 404 page. It’s the only link the Search Engines will be able to follow from any of the interior pages.
6. The custom 404 page is a sitemap. Unfortunately, it’s the sitemap for the original page structure, so every link in it is a 404– back to the broken sitemap.
7. Now this could just be my own particular taste kicking in, but swimming pool turquoise, hot pink and glaring white hurts my eyes. It’s even worse when the page header, which is a particularly virulent shade of Pepto Bismol Pink is BLINKING TEXT.

Hmm, is that old site still around? The one called “Web Sites that Suck” ??? If so, we have a prime candidate here. What amazes me is that the so-called web design company who did this site has their prices posted on their webpage. They’re doing substandard work for ridiculous rates and I’m doing quality work for reasonable rates. What’s wrong with this picture?

It really amazes me that there are web companies today that get away with doing this type of tag soup design. Within six months this site, which had good Google PR and decent Google SERPs, will be completely off the radar screen.

No, I won’t link to a site that dead ends in Flash ani. So you’ll have to find it yourself, IF YOU CAN . . .

Technorati Tags: website design, tag soup design, Google PR, Google SERPs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 6:49 pmunder SEO, Web Design and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.