Is Your Website A Mess?

Posted by Trent on September 24, 2008Permalink

In my youth, I was a complete slob. My solution when told to clean my room was to push all the Legos, comic books and Micro Machines underneath my bed. Replicating this fairly simple process on a weekly basis lead to layers upon layers of mess. Inevitably the mess expanded beyond the edges of my bed skirt and, unable to conceal my brilliant cleaning method any longer, my parents stepped in for an intervention.

We dragged the mattress outside to reveal the biggest pile of Mattel and Marvel I’ve ever seen. I had no idea how out of hand things got. How was I supposed to find anything? How are we going to clean this up? Where are we going to start?

Many of the sites we look at redesigning come to us in the same state my 4th grade bedroom was at its worst – layers upon layers of mess. Here are a few strong indicators that your site either needs a good cleaning, or a complete overhaul:

Your Site Map Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore

Site administrators are often prone to creating web pages a handful at a time to highlight something current only to forget about them later. When pages are created without consideration in regards to how they affect the overall site navigation things can easily get out of hand. Over time you find yourself with a site tree that has grown a monstrous root system and sprouted into its own forest. Site visitors become lost in an unintuitive navigation ready to move on to a site they can use easily and quickly.

You Think Everything Belongs Online

Who is your website for and how do you want them to use it? Granted, there may be multiple answers to this question, but don’t put anything online that doesn’t directly help the cause. If you only have minutes or seconds of a visitor’s time, you need to get to the point.

Broken Links

This is a key sign that you either neglecting your site’s content or have too many pages to effectively manage. Usually, when I come across a broken navigation or link I leave the site immediately. They obviously aren’t paying attention to what they are putting online so why should I?

Mismatched Graphics, Fonts, And Colors

If you have hired a web designer, leave the web design to them. When sites are initially designed, your online content has been branded. Fonts, colors and graphics have been chosen to compliment each other. In other words, if your site were meant to have bright pink text, it would have been launched that way!

While this isn’t a comprehensive list of what makes a messy website, I am sure It’s enough to help diagnose the problem. More often than not, messy websites come from messy content management systems (CMS). We will be posting again soon with some information about what we think makes a great CMS. The CMS may not have a huge affect on how your site looks the day it launches, but you can be sure it will have a massive impact on how your site looks and functions as the months go by.