I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I am tired of businesses and organizations that do not have anything remotely close to an adequate website. It is 2015.
If you’ll allow me to complain for a moment, there are certain things every business must do:
- Tell me your hours.
- Tell me your prices and in only rare cases is it acceptable to say “call us for pricing”. Rare instances.
- Tell me your products plainly and directly.
The same goes for organizations of various kinds:
- Tell me your hours.
- Tell me what you do, plainly and directly.
- Tell me how to get started.
Again, it is 2015. My phone has more computing power than the Apollo missions. I want to use it.
Because if your website does not do these few things, I will automatically assume the following:
- Websites without hours are intrinsically or sorta open all the time. In some cases this is true, like our own.
- If you blather on about “offering solutions” and not much else or “Leaders in enterprise” or some other equally vague, unhelpful, weasel phrase, I get to assume you do overpriced meta work. It’s likely you have no clue what your niche is or purpose for coming to work is.
- If you don’t include prices or costs of delivery, I assume your service isn’t that great and you need to get a sales person on the phone with me so you can keep following up, begging, pleading, pressuring, and cajoling me. To be fair, some services do need a conversation, like ours from time to time. But we at least try to publish a few overarching guidelines so we’re not wasting anyone’s time.
And lastly, I am offended by bad design.
If your billboard is ugly and over-filled with text, or your flyer cliche, or your cover photo blurry, I get to assume you have no standards. I get to assume you have no attention to detail or desire for quality. At the very least you could change the font or just not publish anything at all.
A group’s marketing and outreach should be treated like food. If you don’t want to eat it yourself because it’s bad, burnt, or fell on the floor, don’t serve it.