Web designs are the new business cards.  You want to brag about your company?  You better be ready to add an URL address to your personal data.  Is there a company that doesn’t like to have smooth business cards to share and spread the word?

Lousy business cards, with Internet-stolen clip art, lame fonts and clashing color schemes.  That’s almost as bad as attending a business meeting with egg and coffee stains all over your tie.  Can you even begin to imagine how embarrassing might be to have a lousy website now?

Good advice is always overlooked.  The information is out there, suggestions (made by people in the business), criticisms, tutorials, tools of all sorts and checklists are published constantly and, in many cases, for free.  I should stop being a cyber-romantic and finally face the truth:  only a few of us are meticulous.

This is a bad thing already, even when it comes to amateur, personal websites.  It becomes some kind of a paradox.  You share your information (personal data, thoughts, party pictures) with other people because you expect to extend your network and make new friends or business contacts, yet the design of your site makes getting this information an endless, painful endeavor.  Why?  Is it because you don’t have anything to say and you hide under layers and layers of easily-attainable contents?  Ask yourself.  It will do you good.

Let’s take the same situation to a business scenario:  clarity is no longer an option.  The attention span is getting smaller as time goes by and you only have a few precious seven seconds to get your potential customer’s interest.  Those seven seconds mean the difference between advertising and converting.  I ask again:  why on Earth do people make these sites hard to find through search engines, hard to navigate and hard to… forget?

Yes, coping with frustration makes it hard to endure and then forget a traumatic experience.  Some websites will dominate your palate for years to come.

Usually, we discuss technical or business-oriented aspects of websites here and how to save time and problems.  What to do, what not to, how to start, how to top it all with a cherry… mere suggestion, yet well intended and fairly documented.  We’re just doing our part here.

It’s not about having a pretty site.  There are pretty sites out there yet they don’t generate conversions.   I don’t think it’s a matter of form-over-substance.  Some cars are an eyesore, yet they manage to work on rough environments reliably.  It is possible (heck, it’s easy!) to build up a web site that works as a productive business tool as well.

So, what gives?

1.  Magical Thinking

“Magical Thinking” is the dynamic, albeit blind, display of faith in a person, animal, object or concept.  Some people believe that having a little online diorama of their companies online will guarantee immediate success.  It’s not occupational therapy: designing a website requires time, effort and investment.  How much or how little? Take a look below.

2.  Reckless Behavior

When the issues of a website stop being a problem of irresponsibility and they become a problem of hygiene, we have a problem.  Broken links, heavy images, messy site structure, crummy black-hat schemes to attract people towards our pages is not only unprofessional.  At this point of online cultural evolution, it is disrespectful.  If you want it to work, you have to CARE.

3. Pathological corner-cutting.

“Cost-effective” will never be the same as “cheap”.  The main difference is that cost-effective strategies demand some sacrifices.  Cheap strategies simply make sacrifices, necessary and not.  Mostly unnecessary.  Pinching pennies when you’re earning  more than pennies is overkill.

It’s hard not to sound angry when you see some sites.  I hate wasting my time, specially when I have a very specific query in mind.  Stumbling upon these pages makes me cringe and there are no excuses to display your company in a way less than dignified. YOUR company.

An ignorant doesn’t understand the causes.  An idiot doesn’t understand consequences.