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Website Horror Stories

The following are real examples we've either seen ourselves or heard first hand. Take care that none of these happen to you.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

A business owner asked why his website could not be found in the search engines. We discovered that the entire homepage was created with only images. Even what appeared to be text was just pictures of text.

This person had hired a graphic designer and that's exactly what he got—a graphic design. Unfortunately, search engines don't read graphics. If you don't have lots of real text, don't expect search engine traffic.

Hotel California

A company whose stated goal is to be "known as the easiest vendor to do business with" had a navigation scheme that we couldn't figure out how to use.

Unfortunately, they couldn't appreciate the irony. The "cool" look of their site was more important to them than helping people find what they came for.

The worst prisons are the ones we create for ourselves.

The Domain in the Black Lagoon

A business owner had a friend build his website. The "friend" registered the domain in his own name, not the businesses'. It took an entire month and a discussion of possible legal action before we could wrestle the domain away and set it up properly.

The Blob

A consultant created his own business website in Microsoft Publisher, which is a graphic design tool, not a web tool. He uploaded the resulting files to his website. The files were so large that the site took forever (in internet time) to download. Most people will click away rather than wait for a sloooow website. We rebuilt his site in Microsoft Frontpage and now it's a speed demon.

The Host that Ate My Profits

When asked how much a business was paying for their website hosting, the response was $100 per month. Now, if you have a large website with major ecommerce going on, that might be reasonable, but this was a 6-page starter website. We moved them to a $8 per month host.

The Frozen Waste

We bid on a project to rebuild a 20-page website (a 1-month project). Right before we sign on the dotted line, a new manager is put in charge. The new manager decides it would be more cost-effective to use in-house resources to rebuild the website.

When we checked back 4 months later, they still had the old site up. A year later they had progressed to a "This Website is Under Construction" page. Certainly they saved money, but did they make any?

The Little Shop of $100 Horrors

A small business owner was told that her site could only be changed by developers at $100 per hour. We taught her to use Macromedia Contribute and now she does almost all of the website updates herself. 

The Attack of the 50 Field Monster

We spoke to a business owner who had no less than 50 fill-in-the blanks and checkboxes on their Contact Us form. It wasn't surprising that they were getting no responses. We rebuilt their form with 4 fields and now it actually gets inquiries from prospects. Imagine that!

Invasion of the Corporate Image Snatchers

One of our clients had a website that made his firm look like a million bucks. You might think that would be a good thing, but in this case the firm was all about personal service and caring for people. The big corporate image was a complete mismatch. We rebuilt this site with a softer, more personal tone to reflect the unique value they brought to their customers.

The Invisible Man

"My previous developer just stopped responding to my requests. No email, no phone, no anything." We've heard this sad statement from more than one client who had dealt with a website firm lacking integrity. Fortunately, they found Crystal Point Consulting. You can see some of their comments around this website.

Forewarned is Forearmed

Don't let these horrors happen to you. Contact Crystal Point Consulting today.

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