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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Anatomy of a Terrible Web Site

No, I have not seen it ALL, but if I haven't seen it, I've at least read about it, or so I thought. What I'm about to describe doesn't quite fit the traditional definition of spam. I think of it more like either a) grasping at straws or b) knowing just enough to be dangerous and then...being dangerous.

It all started with my trip on Tuesday to New York City. The trip was for an SEO seminar and had been planned for some time. Of course, I waited until the Friday prior to book my travel. There was a hotel that had been recommended and that I wanted to try. To save them public embarrassment and humiliation, they will go nameless - I'll call it instead the Midtown Park hotel. Here's what happened...

I found the site in Google by typing in the hotel name into the search box and, as expected, it appeared in the SERP. At least they ranked for their own name. Then I clicked into the site.

I was met with a splash page of sorts. It had a big "Enter" button in the middle of the page. I clicked. I was met with something that I thought might give me a seizure. It began with, er uh, music. The sound started with a clicking noise, then what might have been footsteps, then something like a dj scratching a record, followed by some syncopated, off-beat acid jazz. That was just the music. The screen was flashing and pulsing with different hues of reds and blacks, with words appearing and disappearing all over the page and in various font sizes and colors. One phrase read, "welcome to fashion." Uh, okay.

Immediately frustrated with the ridiculous user experience, I went back to the home/splash page. Once there, I found that there are six (6) choices the user may make: DSL Version, With Intro, Full Screen, Modem Version, No Intro, and This Window. I selected DSL Version, No Intro, and This Window.

Phew - that got me in without my grand-mal worries.

Now I was in the site. All I wanted was the phone number, which I found. But being an SEO, I decided to have a look around...

Though it stared me in the face, I had to study it for a few minutes before I really understood what I was looking at. At first glance, it looked normal - I saw the head tag and the usual title tag and meta keyword and description tags. I expected to see the flash file directly below, after all, it was clearly an all-flash site. But I didn't see that - not at all. Instead I saw this:

frameset rows="*,0" framespacing="0" frameborder="0" border="0"

Huh? A frame set? Why? It's an all flash site, right? Yep. And a framed site too. Huh?

The frame set contained two frames, a main and a pixel. All sizes were set to "0." Then I saw the noframes tag, inside which was 1030 words of content. No matter what page you go to this is the code you encounter because of the unchanging url structure that is found in the flash design.

Yes, you have it right - it is an all flash site, dropped into a framed site, presumably to feed the bots something in the noframes tag, thus avoiding the lack of content issue encountered by all-flash sites.

To make matters worse, the tagging info that is present is also all wrong. The title is "The Midtown Park Hotel :::::: New York :::::::The Official Website" and the meta description is: "Official website of New York Hotel - The Midtown Park Hotel" Then the keyword tag contains 186 words, 37 of which are the word "hotel" or "hotels" and 19 of which are the word "New York." I wonder, were they trying to rank for "New York," "Hotel," or "Official Web site?"

This site makes so many mistakes I can't even list them. Both in terms of human usability and robot spiderability, this site does it all - wrong.

Yesterday morning, I reached out the senior marketing manager who runs the site. I invited her to come to my workshop as my guest. She declined. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote up a quick summary of the SEO mistakes on her site and sent them in an e-mail. One of my colleagues chastised me saying, "You sent her a report worth at least a thousand dollars in consulting fees." Well, probably so. But it was such an egregious set of mistakes, I had to tell her.

Chalk another one up to a probably well-intentioned designer thinking they know SEO only to fire a bullet into their foot. Bruce Clay said it best when he said, "Google doesn't care if you shoot yourself in the foot." And so it goes - the Midtown Park hotel doesn't turn up in any of the keyword searches I tried. Of course they would have no way of knowing this, what without analytics.

It's almost hard to believe. But I suppose in all great mistakes there are lessons to be learned. This is no exception. It is a case study in what not to do when building a Web site - the anatomy of a terrible web site.

An "A" for effort, to be sure. One of my sharper colleagues only gave them a B+.

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