Making assumptions can cost a business dearly

By Andrea Hill

The year was 1990-something, and my son was in fourth grade. He had acquired a baking bug, and he decided to bake a chocolate vinegar cake (if you’ve never had it, it’s amazing). He did a pretty good job of following all the instructions…except he switched the sugar and the baking soda quantities. The result was a blown-off oven door and chocolate spread throughout the kitchen and dining room. After much relief, laughter, and scrubbing, he said, “I never knew something we eat could be explosive.”

Those three words, “I never knew,” are at the heart of many mistakes. They show up in the form of assumptions, and in the failure to ask questions. In this year’s columns, we’re going to focus on a series of “I never knew” issues that commonly trip up business owners.

Today, let’s talk about your website. One of my clients has had a professionally managed website for many years. It cost him about $200/month to keep everything up to date technically and graphically. But recently, he decided to let his son, who had just finished taking a class in web design and is a talented artist, take over the website. The son decided to move the website to a platform that didn’t require him to learn any code. His design skills are excellent, but he lacks an understanding of the technology that powers the internet.

Once the design was complete, he shut down the old site, flipped on the new site, and voilà! They lost all the search engine optimization (SEO) value they had built over eight years in a two-week period. The site looked great, but that didn’t matter. People could no longer find it.

So, what didn’t they know? Something a lot of people don’t know: That when it comes to websites, how they work is more important than how they look.

I’m not saying design doesn’t matter. A website must be user-friendly. Shoppers are people of habit. Consumers have spoken, and they’ve said, “Don’t make us figure out your website. Use common conventions and make it easy for us.” Menus should be up top, either centered or to the right. Logos on top, either left or centered. They want the “about” page to be named “about,” not something strange and mystical. There’s no need to get cute with the basics: Consumers want you to take them straight to the products, services, and information, and to do a good job with those.

So design matters, but only to the extent that people find it pleasing to the eye and can use it to discover what they are looking for.

What matters more than design? The technology. You see, Google and the other search engine providers (but mostly Google, which has more than 80 percent of the search market) have a vested interest in being considered the best search engine. That means giving searchers the best results as quickly as possible. To do that, they require website owners to do their part.

What does that mean? That means:

• Your website works well on devices of every size automatically, no pinching and pulling to make screens fit.

• You have no broken links.

• You introduce new content regularly.

• Your content is interesting. Yes, that’s right! Google monitors how long people stay on your site and if they bounce right back out again without visiting a second page. 

• Your images have names and “alt text.”

• Video and audio content is also available as a transcript, so the search engines can index what is in them.

There is a variety of other technical requirements, but these are the big ones.

What this young website creator didn’t know was that making an entirely new website orphaned all those links that were connected to the old website pages. Once posted, links float around on the internet for all time. Google’s robots quickly discovered the domain name was affiliated with dozens of broken links, and it downgraded the site on search results.

Another thing this young website creator didn’t know was that when it comes to using the drag-and-drop website creation systems (such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or Square Space), they are not all equal, and the decision shouldn’t be based on pricing or ease of design alone. In this case, the tool that was easiest to use was chosen. Important considerations about SEO and extensions (apps that allow you to add features to the site) weren’t factored in, and now the site is limited in current and future functionality and much weaker in SEO.

My son wasn’t trying to land a job in a bakery at the age of nine, and luckily, nobody was hurt. So his cake-baking experiment was simply a good learning experience. But in business, we need to remember to ask more questions and never assume. Otherwise, “I never knew” will come with an exorbitant price tag.