With the imminent arrival of web 3.0, the semantic web, savvy companies are reviewing their online activity, but how do you know when your website has had its day?

The big one

You can’t update it instantly. If you have to wait for your web agency to make content changes for you, involving a wait and an invoice at the end of it then you really need to change to a user friendly CMS.

It isn’t built in Open Source

If your website was built using a proprietary CMS (a system created by your web developer that only he has the keys to) then you are missing out on the potential for regular FREE technical updates from developers around the world. Websites built using Open Source have this functionality as standard.

It doesn’t answer the customer question  ‘what’s in it for me’

Lots of websites are developed for the board of directors and are primarily used to broadcast company services to an unsuspecting public rather than simply helping the customer to find wat they want quickly. We call these sites vanity sites and you can usually spot them because they have ‘about us’ as their second page. THINK! Yes the customer might want to know a little more about you when they’ve decided to purchase but it really isn’t the first thing they want to know.

Pages are a sea of copy

People browsing online are impatient to find what they want. They will not sit and read through paragraphs of prose – not only do they not have time but it makes their eyes hurt. Break it down with good navigation, use headings, bullets, numbered lists and draw their attention to key points using bold.

Pages are a sea of images

From the sublime to the ridiculous, don’t waste precious optimisation opportunities by having hardly any copy at all.

Flash – aaargh

Owing to the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe, the iphone, ipad and ipod cannot play flash content. Given the market penetration of these devices, you will be losing numerous visitors if your homepage is based on flash (however given how difficult it is to optimise flash homepages not many people will be finding you in the first place).