I was talking to a friend of mine about a WordPress website someone did at a company she works with and the programmer did not do such a hot job.
She said, “I thought WordPress was supposed to be easy!” I said, “Oh it is easy. It’s very easy . . . to make a bad WordPress site.” What do I mean by bad?
Here are 13 signs of a bad dog WordPress website:
- The developer hard-coded elements instead of using native WordPress functionality thus making it impossible to maintain by the end-user.
- Someone used 52 plugins to create the site and thirty of them each have you do something a little different so that no one can remember how to update different types of content on the site.
- It looks good but the end-user can’t figure out what the site is for, and there are no calls to action anywhere.
- The site has a dark background and white letters with small font and provides tutorials that you can’t read.
- The site has so many moving parts on the site you are at risk for a seizure.
- The company is tooting its own horn rather than providing content to connect with the reader.
- The site has too many pages and too much information so that it is totally overwhelming and you can’t find what you are looking for.
- The site has so many 3,000 pixel images loaded that it is too big to back up, and reduces the speed and performance of the website.
- There is nothing personal or special about the site that allows people to connect with the company.
- The blog shows one sentence of the content and no image.
- The graphics and site design looks like the work of an elementary school kid.
- It is a restaurant site and the address and phone don’t show up on a mobile phone. And the entire website is not mobile responsive.
- The customizations were done to the theme itself rather than made in a “child theme”, so it can’t be updated without losing all of the customizations.
I could go on but I won’t. There is no substitute for a well-designed, properly-coded site that has been judicious with its dependence upon plugins. Things go up from there if the marketing message is clear and targeted and if there is content on the site that shows passion, expertise, and personality such that it compels visitors to take action.
If you want an effective site that you can maintain, think twice about doing it yourself, getting it from India, bidding it out on oDesk, or letting the person from church help you out.
Sometimes that ends up costing you much more than you reckoned it would.
