What would you do if you found out one of your best sales people was randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 people?  People who might have bought from you, but the salesperson  turned them away because of their own prejudices.

Recently I was on a conference call with a client, and one of the services he was using. We were trying to work through some issues  and during the discussion one of the issues that came up was that the services site was designed to run in Internet Explorer only.

I can understand if you are running an Intranet, inside a company where the browser is dictated by IT, but for a public website, you are essentially turning away 1 out of every 4 or 5 customers.

So I ask again could you imagine your  bank, grocery store, or gas station or your store randomly turning away 1 out of every 5 customers because they drove a mini-van instead of a car to get to the store? Of course not! That salesperson should and probably would be fired for such foolishness!

Web browsers are like cars in many ways. They are the vehicle which your customer uses to get to your website. Just because Internet Explorer holds 80% of the market share, doesn’t mean that it should be the only browser you allow your customers to use. Your site should be designed to work with all modern browsers – and if it doesn’t you should fire your web designer.

(Note: names withheld to protect the guilty.)

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One thing I’ve noticed, is that while working on other companies web sites, the one web site which tends to get updated the least is…. my own. This apparently isn’t specific to me, as I’ve talked with many other web designers who have the same issue. I’ve even heard of web designers hiring other web designers to do their web site.

Since it has been a little while since I did a major update to my site (this past summer when I added the blog), I decided I should be performing some updates. Some are for aesthetics, others provide speed enhancements, and some improve search engine ranking and results.

• Simplified my right column on the blog. This has done several things.
  • It makes the site faster to download. Fewer widgets to process and download, result in faster page loads and less work for the server to perform.
  • It reduces “duplicate” content for the site. When the same content can be accessed from several different links, it makes it harder for search engines to determine which is the best one to display, so the results get spread thin, instead of showing a stronger single page more often.
• I’ve edited my pages to make them more efficient. By reducing the processing on the server, I’ve increased the responsiveness of the web server.
• Gearing my pages to be more about web design instead of web development. Why? Well in searches web design is searched for about 4 times as often as web development. So while I technically do more web development work, most of my customers will know it as web design, and I need to cater to them. This has included adding more and better meta tags, re-writing some of my menus, and adjusting my content.
• What you can’t see yet is adding more images to my site. After working and reading about how I’m optimizing my site to be faster, you might wonder why I’m adding images and flash content. Simple – it aligns with giving users what they want and expect. By giving them more of what they want, I expect to see higher conversion rates from my prospects.

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I recently posted an article about why it doesn’t matter if you are a geek when it comes to putting things on the web. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with some of the technology that a “geek” thinks of and uses anyway.

Case in point: Robert Scoble recently posted an article about “Hanging out with the other 99%“. At a recent block party he spent his time trying to explain to people what he did. Most didn’t know about blogs, video on the internet, facebook, Linked In, or any of a number of other Internet technologies.

While some people, don’t think twice about using these tools and social networks, in other cases, there are people who know nothing about them.

To my fellow web designers and developers: Keep this in mind. If your clients don’t know what you are talking about, it isn’t going to help them.

To my clients (both current and future): If you don’t know – ask! Sometimes these technologies and services can help you – other times they cannot. You are paying people like myself to help your company become better by leveraging the technology available – but we can only do that if its right for you. And not all technology is right for you. If your web person/company can’t/won’t explain the new technologies to see if they are right for you – contact walt design. We can help.

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