Quote:
Originally Posted by Ravensknight
After looking over their site, I have to wonder, WHY do they even have a site yet? I went over expecting a bit more than some colors on a under construction website.
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There's no there there. This is why I'm writing a book on website design: To smack people like this upside th' haid with. You do not,
do not, launch your site until you've got something on it. Something that your users want, that is, not your mission statement or other corprobabble that nobody but your CEO cares about. And no user should ever, ever,
ever see an "under construction" page. If a page doesn't exist yet, then the link should be either grayed out or not there. Otherwise, you're teaching your users that your site is a collection of dead links. So even when you
do eventually have content on those pages, most people who've been there before and found nothing but "under construction" notices won't bother to go back.
Before I learned the right question to ask them, I would ask clients "What do you want your website to do?" The answer, almost universally, was "Tell people about our company." The problem is this: nobody but
you gives a fig about your company. If you go to a bookstore website, do you go to read about the company or buy the books? I'd venture a guess that it's to buy books ... so if all you can do is read about the company, your mental tag will be "nothing there for me" and they'll have to try twice as hard to get you back there ever again.
You wouldn't think this stuff was rocket surgery...