They still don't get it!

What year is this? I’m not sure because when I got an (unsolicited) email at work announcing the new website of a company I’d never heard of before, I felt like I was in a time-warp. While the HTML email is good alright, if irrelevant, it does date itself with this statement: “Visit and bookmark our website for future reference. Arris International Corp. constantly evolves to meet the needs of a changing marketplace.” This belongs in the same paragraph?

I started looking closer at the email and then the website, and found a number of technical errors that just shouldn’t happen in 2005–especially with a ‘new’ website. Not to mention marketing copy and visuals that look so 1999. But let me just pick on the technical errors, as copy and visuals are much more subjective.

• First off the email is spam, sent to our sales@ email address.
• The subject line is pretty lame: “Arris Int’l Corp.: New Website”. (You may say this is a subjective opinion, but I think this actually a technical error…subject lines need to be useful.)
• The email has javascript in it (to create a pop-up of all things), which Outlook doesn’t like and I imagine might get blocked by some mail servers.
• The email promotes www.arrisinternational.com, which is actually just framing the content from www.arris-intl.com. Why? Are they trying track response to the email? There are more professional ways of doing this.
• Why start to use the longer URL when the -intl URL has a Google PageRank of 5? But as you will see, they don’t care about search engines.
• They use graphics for major content, including their name and address. Their name is used in text only five times in the whole site.
• Their major keywords of what they do are also in the graphic header of each page, where search engines can’t find them.
• All pages have the same title-tag, which is just the company name.
• On the right-side of the home page is their worst crime against the user: A vertical-scrolling marque containing seven paragraphs and 150 words. How does one read this moving block of text?
• The graphic on the left of the page is a 1.6M animated GIF.
• Besides the navigation, there is only one link on the home page. Home pages are supposed to be about providing info-scent and navigation.

There is enough technical skill in this site to say that webmaster knows what he is doing, but enough errors to say that he needs to learn more. If they want more traffic for their site, they need to make it search-engine friendly, not send out spam.