Lesson 2 for B2B websites

Yesterday I covered the simple things that need to be fixed on B2B websites. One reader provided a list of other no-nos. A lot of these are what Father Flanders preaches at his website and in his book, Web Pages That Suck. Read his blog to see a near-daily fix of bad websites.

• Don't use Flash intros. Why? Most don't say anything of substance and just waste the visitors time. 'We are dedicated to serving our customers' is not compelling content, and even worse when it is spelled out one letter at a time.


• If you have to tell the visitor how to use the site, chances are something is wrong. Telling them to download special software, or to have their screen set to a certain size, or to use a certain version of a browser is likely to be ignored anyway.


• If you have a more than ten pages in your site, a 'site map' is a great idea to help people see if your site is even structured to hold the content they are looking for. I prefer all these types of navigation on a website: buttons, breadcrumbs, site-map, and search. Different users navigate differently.


• Another issue is to address, especially for EU companies, is making sure that the multi-lingual versions of your site are easy to find. I've seen very confusing flag icons and other methods used. I'm not sure of a right way to do this, as I haven't had to deal with more than English.

Most of these have to deal with greater issues and aren't as easy to fix as the ones I identified yesterday. But they need to be taken care of.