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The Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007

Having worked with web sites for the past eleven years, I've
seen a LOT of errors, poor judgment and embarrassing gaffs on
the web. Sometimes they are the fault of the client, the web
designer, the IT Manager, or the SEO, but human error is always
to blame. The saddest thing is that the problems are usually
preventable.

Here is a list of what I consider to be the Top 10 dumbest web
site decisions ever, in reverse order, David Letterman style :

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990's when I was working
for a large Internet agency, the web designers had
responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of
clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with
a major client, during which the client asked him to register
CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check
and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the
purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that
he'd had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually*
wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the
desired domain wasn't available and the whole office dined on
his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a
month after site launch? A very large one, that's who. I'll
save the company some embarrassment and won't reveal their name
but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they
scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and
cover their tails.

8) Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by
hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common
folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this
folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and
so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic
data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew
where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who
said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and
was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world
to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I've
never let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including
AOL, who published a search data report (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal) in 2006 that contained the private
details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was
taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored
and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led
to the resignation of AOL's Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once
published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager
about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a
higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn't realize
the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page
copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a
regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely
re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their
web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case
visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer
existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

"404 Error. You've obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either
that or the page you are looking for no longer exists."

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendation
to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just
an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot.
Persons viewing that page would be clicking the "back" button
as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent
people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular
basis. Search engines don't understand the "Back in 15
minutes" sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the
risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will
most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and
remove them from the search index. This means that all your
hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until
search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a
mirror site for maintenance periods isn't that difficult to set
up?

4) Buying a Dot Biz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I'm putting up my hand on this one. I'm not going to
reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot biz domain back in
2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com
version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and
turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time,
dot biz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all
companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I
was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12
   Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given
the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real
estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the
welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing
customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave
comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback
and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by
an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most
colorful language I've ever seen (and some that I hadn't) and
very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her
revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to
destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even
noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential
customers would have been put off from using the estate agent
after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacation.

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her
entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a
3 week vacation over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had
paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the
carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she
shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign
that said "closed until after Christmas". I noticed the traffic
and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely
flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I
confronted her? "Why didn't you TELL ME this could happen?"

And the dumbest web site decision I've ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don't Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands
of dollars on television advertising here in Australia,
marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework:
GradSchool Dot Com. There's only one problem. The domain for
this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don't even own
Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally
escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as
Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout
their .com.au domain. It's tragic to think of all the potential
students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the
University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com
has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will
reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars
wasted by the University.

Don't let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make
sure that your site decisions aren't in the hands of dummies!
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Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as
running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm), Kalena manages
Search Engine College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/) - an
online training institution offering instructor-led short courses
and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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