Is Your Website Killing Your Business?
Feb 12, 2021
3 min read
What to do when you suspect your ugly or broken website is scaring off your visitors.
Written by Sarah Jampen Almazan
Illustration by Mayara Lista
As a storyteller, I love a good bad guy. While I’d be pretty useless in a fight against Freddy Kruger or any situation involving a clown, I’ve gotten pretty good at slaying the monsters that plague my clients: abominable legacy websites. In this blog post, I break down the three worst types of monster websites, where they come from, and how to vanquish them.
01.
The Content Rat King
If you don’t know what a rat king is, don’t look it up. No, I’m serious, don’t do . . . You did it, didn’t you? Well, now you know the horror visitors experience when they find themselves tangled in your mangled mess of a site map.
The Content Rat King’s Origin Story
The Content Rat-King is a creature that develops slowly, over time. At first, every page you create has a purpose. But as your business plan and strategy evolves, you create more and more! Before you know it no one can make heads nor tails of what’s going on. This tends to happen when there is a fundamental problem with your core business pages: they are not properly communicating what the company does, and why anyone should be doing business with you. This creates a communication vacuum that you desperately try to fill by creating more and more web pages, blog posts, micro-sites, etc.
Untangling the Content Rat King
Good news! There is a pretty easy solution: Instead of trying to untangle that mess, simply go back to basics. Take some time to figure out who your customer is, what information they need, and how your product or service brings them value. Writing clear, concise, and convincing web copy for core pages like your Homepage and Pricing page is the surest way to eliminate your useless content, and banish the Rat King once and for all.
02.
The Features Frankenstein
You were so proud of it at first, but now Features Frankenstein has turned against you! Every day your load-time gets slower, something gets broken, and you exhaustingly try to keep this monster of your own creation from imploding. The villagers keep gathering at your door with their pitchforks, screaming about your website being down! Will the nightmare ever end?
The Creation of Features Frankenstein’s
The Features Frankenstein materializes when a business hastily chooses to start building their website, often by choosing a WordPress template that doesn’t truly fit their needs. They end up having to modify it with all sorts of plug-ins and integrations as their business strategy evolves. Eventually, the website becomes a monstrous and unnatural thing that only brings misery to everyone it encounters.
Slaying Features Frankenstein
The secret here is to not be sentimental. You are not married to your website, and you should not hold onto it if it is broken and turning against you. Actually, ask yourself: what is my website’s role in my marketing and sales funnel? Chances are you can use Squarespace to design a simple and elegant website that will convert visitors into paying customers.
03.
The Ancient Mummy
She might have been a beauty in her time, but today she’s a terrifying corpse covered in bandages, as ancient as the relics that scatter her tomb. You try to draw visitors to your website, but she keeps chasing them away!
The Ancient Mummy’s Origin Story
While you might not think your website is ancient, let me tell you this: if it was designed and coded in the 90’s it might as well be from 3025 BCE. The Ancient Mummy tends to plague established companies who have historically done amazingly through more traditional marketing channels such as print and radio and have neglected their online assets.
Breaking the Curse of the Mummy
Some websites are meant to be buried. The Ancient Mummy simply does not belong in our decade! It might feel like refreshing your brand and overhauling your legacy website will take a few centuries, but getting a fresh-looking and functional Squarespace website up goes pretty quickly when you’re working with an experienced web project manager and copywriter.