I know that there are a lot of incompetent people in the world, and I know I shouldn’t let it upset me, but I just can’t help it.
PS: You might want to skip this blog post, it really is just random ranting. I’ll probably delete the post once I stop feeling the need to phone them up and give them a piece of my mind.
We recently had an ecommerce website developed. Personally, I was unconvinced about the company we employed to develop it right from the start, but they were dressed well enough and they talked the talk, so they got the job (Not because of my opinion of them, I might add).
Before we even started, I asked them about SEO, about performance (Including why their own website needed 84 HTTP requests just to open the homepage), about why they used a drupal platform and how that helps us, and about how they would make sure that we could track analytics and do split testing.
Essentially their answer was to tell us that our website would be better, and that they just don’t bother optimizing their own because they don’t really feel the need. Don’t worry, you’re website will be much better than the other one’s you can see that we built, promise.
They also eventually admitted that they use drupal because they know it and they’ve set up a base installation that makes it simple to build a site. Fair enough I guess… Nothing in there that helps us, but hey.
What really concerned me though was that they didn’t have the slightest clue about what analytics would actually be important or even what multivariate split testing was.
We discussed what we wanted (thankfully, I was only involved in the first meeting), and they told us it would take a month to build. 6 months later they delivered a site, which amazingly was even worse than their own (at the very least regarding performance). We are now the proud owners of a site that needs an astonishing 177 HTTP requests to open the home page.
More scary though, the homepage contains a header with a scrolling slidedeck, a menu down the left, 4 youtube videos, an animation, a button to buy, a button to view a demo, a big-ass livechat button, scrolling testimonials and a button to one of our online applications. This is just the sidebars, header and navigation. The actual contents of the page is a pane with 3 tabs, the first of which contains an accordian with 7 buttons showing a summary of 7 different highlights (Each of which has a button linking to a new page). The second tab contains a pricing page and the third tab contains information about what to do after you ordered (with a text link to sign up now at the bottom of the page) .
If you click anywhere to order, you go to a copy of the pricing page as it is on the homepage, but with an order button on the bottom of the page (and a tab at the top to let existing customers pay – Don’t ask).
I must admit, this is the first time I really look at the content in detail – I knew that the site was too busy and that there wasn’t clear paths for the users to navigate, but this is worse than I thought.
Of course, all this is just my opinion. We’ll start sending some PPC traffic to it soon and let the market vote on whether it’s a good site or not.
What actually set of this whole rant was the fact that the company that developed the site signed of on it and was paid while I was on leave. I originally complained about performance, so their solution was to convince us to pay for a different hosting account, because that was definately the only problem. When I saw the site I raised the fact that aside from the parts that just didn’t work, performance was still a problem. Eventually it was agreed that we’ll have a meeting about it.
I went and put together a list of problems (essentially as an agenda) and emailed it out to my employer and to the company that did the dev. Eventually on the morning that we’re supposed to meet (After it was postponed 3 times), I find out that the company won’t deal with me because apparently I’m rude, I have no idea what I’m talking about, my SEO knowledge is outdated and they’ve already spent too much time on this. As it turns out, I just don’t like them and that’s why I will never believe their design is good (That and the fact that it would take months to teach me real SEO). They got all of this from a 2 sentence email and a list of problems.
The points I raised was:
- The forms causes an “Internal server error” – That wasn’t really in the spec
- They haven’t set up analytics (Which I couldn’t do since they didn’t give me admin access)
- Validation fails with 83 errors and 72 warnings
- There’s no meta tags (Not very important granted, but surely not that difficult)
- The H1 and H2 tags are “Home Page”, “Search Form”, “Testimonials” – I tend to believe Matt Cutts when he says something is important
- Gzip compression is disabled
- 177 HTTP Requests!! 105 images, 29 scripts and 42 CSS imports seems to me a bit over the top
- There’s duplicate scripts
- Put CSS at the top of the html doc and scripts at the bottom
- Specify image dimensions
I’m not sure what outdated SEO knowledge you can find in that, but I assume that “Riaan’s email was so rude I simply refuse to deal with him.” was caused by the fact that I suggested that I didn’t need to exapand further on these points since any competent web developer would know what I’m talking about. Of course it might be the fact that they had been paid already and just couldn’t care less about the quality of their work. I have my suspicions.
