Web Site Watch: City of Colton

Back on May 12, 2005, The Press-Enterprise published an article about the City of Colton undertaking a web site overhaul. I thought it'd be fun to poke around on the City of Colton website now, discuss some of their issues here and then check back at the end of the year to see how they're doing.

Why do I care? Well, have you seen some of these city web sites? I won't use this platform to call anybody out, but good grief!

2 major goals of the City of Colton seem to be 1) making the web site more interactive and 2) making it easier to navigate. I sincerely applaud that. A brochure web site is nice for an accountant but on a city web site I wanna do stuff! Remember, web site users come to your site with decisions to make and problems to solve.

Here's a feature they're considering: the ability for residents to identify potholes in their neighborhood that need repair. Hmm, does the City of Corona web site have anything like that? I'll go check right now. Hey, they sure do! (And it took me only seconds to find - kudos Corona!). As a frequent driver, that's a feature I can appreciate. The key question is do they actually have the internal processes in place to support these features in a responsive manner? As I say in my post on web site feature-itis, good people and practices behind all the well-intended web site features are a must.

Just in my casual tour around the City of Colton web site I can already see some design issues I'd like to address in some future posts as I think it would be beneficial to other web site owners. Am I picking on the City of Colton? Certainly not. Their web site woes are perfectly normal and they should be supported in their quest for user-friendliness. Besides, they did agree to the Press-Enterprise article so I'd say they're looking for at least a little attention in regards to their overhaul project.

So stay tuned for the next episode of Web Site Watch: City of Colton.

Obsessive Optimization Disorder

I recently became afflicted with Obsessive Optimization Disorder: the obsessive need to get higher visibility in the search engines.

How the Disorder Begins
For me, it began the first time I actually did something that influenced my search engine ranking. Adjusted a title here, rearranged some body text there and voila, I moved from relative obscurity to a #1 ranking. Oh, the power!

How the Disorder Takes Over
Well, that #1 ranking is for a phrase that doesn't get searched on often: "Corona small business web site design". For the more competitive "Corona web site design" I'm not #1 but still on page 1. But for the even more competitive "Riverside web site design", I'm not so high at all. Try #56 on Yahoo, below an assisted living retirement community web site and a fly fishing motel web site. And Google doesn't even know I'm alive. (actually they do, they just don't care yet). So, I then became obsessed with getting the engines to notice me in all the ways I wanted to be noticed. After all, I wielded power once, right? And with that innocent question, I was sucked under.

Symptoms of Obsessive Optimization Disorder

• checking your web site rankings several times a day
• checking your link popularity several times a day
• checking your web site stats several times a day (especially if they're only updated once a day)
• wasting good money on a Google AdWords campaign when your site isn't ready for it
• checking your AdWords campaign traffic several times a day
• spending waaayyy too much time in Search Engine Optimization forums
• changing your company name or URL to one that's full of keywords
• believing search engines are conspiring against you
• spending a portion of every day trying to get someone, anyone, to link to you

The Cure
Content Diversion. For 1 month, every time the urge hits to indulge in one of the above symptoms, stop and channel that energy into creating a new piece of useful content for your site or updating some old content. After 1 month: Stop. Analyze. Optimize. Repeat Content Diversion. After 6-12 months, you should have decent rankings and a site that will actually turn those search engine referrals into loyal paying customers.

Paralyzed by Feature-itis?

I've seen feature-itis strike, and sometimes paralyze, quite a few web site owners.

Symptoms

• you hear about a new web site feature and you must investigate it before moving any further with your web site
• whenever you see a feature on a competitor's web site you feel you must have it on yours too
• you spend more time investigating new things to do with your web site than you actually spend doing anything with your web site
• you often waste time or money on web site features that get little use
• you'd rather endlessly tweak a feature to get more use out of it than just abandon it

The Cure
I don't know if there is a cure--I think certain personality types are just prone to it. But, rejoice! Symptoms can be relieved by realizing:

• Feature-itis is usually just rank procrastination dressed up in business attire
• Web site features alone will not increase your sales. You'll need good content, good people and good practices on the other side of those features--things you won't have time to develop if you're off to the next feature.
• Your competitor's site may look snazzy to you but you don't really know how well its perfoming compared to what they've put into it.

If you don't get hit with feature-itis, be on the lookout for related diseases: design-itis and Obsessive Optimization Disorder. I'll discuss those in upcoming posts.

Web Site Taggers - Part 2

I went to one of my online forum hangouts and posted my web site tagging dilemma and got some interesting perspectives that led to more thinking on my part:

Putting a link to your own web site at the bottom of a client's web page seems to be something freelance web site designers do more than full-fledged web design firms. That made me think it was an 'amateur' practice. But if you think about it, full-fledged web design firms that charge thousands can afford expensive advertising so they don't need to put a link on your site. Freelancers are another story.

I also thought it was a 'phony' way of getting link popularity points with the search engines. But, on second thought, if a client allows me to put a link to my own site on their home page, that is indeed a vote of confidence in me and my services.

My new policy is to put a link only on one page of the client's site, only if the client is o.k. with it and only if it doesn't detract from the look or purpose of the site.