Would you employ a Google proof reader?

Just a bit of fun for today’s blog, in which we see how, even with gazillions in riches, Google themselves get things wrong when it comes to accuracy of what’s published.   Here’s the landing page from a promotion they’re currently doing, offering £75 of Google Adwords clicks (with my added commentary) …

It looks as if a previous offer page has been re-used but the changes to it haven’t been proof-read.

It’s not an isolated incident from Google either.  Their help pages in particular often have information that’s out of date.  So when someone points out one of those “wish I’d seen that before they did” errors on your website, console yourself that even the big boys get it wrong sometimes.

Website under construction – be top of Google for stupidity

For most companies it’s great to be top of Google when people type a certain keyword phrase.  Perhaps though, the phrase ‘website under construction’ is not the best phrase to be highly visible under on the first page of Google.

The screenshot below shows the current view of websites (in the UK) that appear top of Google for the phrase ‘website under construction’ …

Top of the pile is http://www.eurofoods.co.uk/, who, as you can see below, have got links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  They’ve even got a 2011 catalogue to view.  But they don’t have a proper website, which you’d think should be the hub of their online marketing, supported by the other elements such as Twitter etc.

In second position is http://www.sensei-winbeforehand.co.uk/2011/02/17/website-under-construction/ who have really gone for their SEO by deliberately having a website url including website-under-construction.  The note on that website says ‘Just a quick note to let you know our website is under construction, so may look a little strange for a few days’.   Nearly 5 months later and the amusing bit is that it’s just an old page that they’ve not taken down and if you go to their real home page everything is normal.  It’s amusing because the business includes proof reading as one of the services, which kind of conflicts with inaccuracies within their own website.

In third place comes http://www.hawleyrussell.com/, who make orthodontic and dental laboratory products.  They have a ‘Website under construction’ message, the ability to download a catalogue and for some strange reason they think people will want to part with the name and email address via their one page site …

You can carry on going through the Google search results looking at numerous similar examples and the more you see, the more it raises one obvious point …

If you are going to change your website then plan it out properly, get the new content created outside of the live version of the website, and then make it live.

Never ever should ‘Website under construction’ come into the vocabulary of anyone who owns a domain name.   Those three words shout out loud and clear:

• We are not organised enough to have sorted out our website.
• We have poor attention to detail.

As for the amounts of business lost all the time a website is in a state of ‘website under construction’ … that’s just criminal!

Typpo Tipo Typo

It’s official – I’m human!   After years of picking up on spelling mistakes within other people’s websites, this week I was picked up on a typo within the Custwin site.   It was only a relatively small one (lawyer spelt as laywer) but nevertheless a mistake.

Thank you goes to Sharon from Redefine for picking me up on that because although it was only one mistake, others who may have seen that mistake before could have thought “that’s sloppy” but never mentioned it.  Worse still, if there had been several mistakes then a particularly negative impression of the business could have formed in the minds of those viewing the website.

Maybe a useful exercise for all businesses to go through is to invite known contacts and friends to skim through the company website to see if there are any typos or other glaring mistakes.  For some clients I’ve advised them to offer staff an incentive to find obvious mistakes (e.g. £1 per mistake found), which can unearth a surprising amount.

Whether getting some friendly help for free or paying what would likely be a small amount for a website to be run through, if the end result is a website free of typos then that’s got to contribute towards website visitors having at least one reason not to click away from your website.

When websites send conflicting messages

This is purely for fun but there’s a serious point to make too.   I stumbled across a website called VoucherHub and specifically a page offering voucher codes for free Google Adwords.  That page is at http://www.voucherhub.com/view/adwords.google.co.uk.

The main part of that page can be seen below …

Near the top of the page it says ‘Sorry, no vouchers at the moment’ but at the bottom of the page there’s the Google advert for ‘Free £30.00 Ads on Google’   A bit of a conflicting message there!

A really really picky person (even more so than me) may think “they’ve given an option to subscribe to be notified of future voucher deals but they’ve not picked up on that £30 offer from Google so how can I believe they’ll be on the ball with new offers?”.

Voucher code sites are becoming more and more popular, as people’s financial spending power is decreasing.  There’s a lot of competition out there (for example, type ‘Google voucher codes’ into Google and that VoucherHub site doesn’t appear until page 3.   If they invested more in SEO to get onto the first page then it would become more important that there weren’t any such conflicting messages on pages as in this example.   Otherwise, people would visit their website, see there’s no clear offer, and would look at the other search results, many of which DO give the £30 voucher much more readily.

How to cheapen a great domain name

www.money.co.uk – what a fantastic domain name to have.  A website full of money-related stuff, including insurance products.   Such a domain is in a great position to impress their readers and subscribers and I almost signed up to join their 530,000 other subscribers.    Until I saw the page http://www.money.co.uk/article/1004273-how-to-buy-critical-illness-cover.htm.

There’s nothing wrong with that page as such.  In fact it gives some great advice on what to look out for when buying critical illness cover.  But the page is there mainly to link people through to the page of critical illness products on offer, which is at http://www.money.co.uk/critical-illness-cover.htm.  On the surface the page looks good, as this partial screenshot hopefully shows …

A neat graphic showing key information about the critical illness products on offer, along with a nice bold ‘Best Price’ button to click on.  So I clicked on the Best Price button on the HSBC line, which brought up the following:

Bearing in mind I’m interested in the HSBC offering and the box is titled ‘HSBC Critical Illness Cover’, it’s perhaps a bit odd to see Google Ads for Bupa, ASDA, and RBS, out of which only one refers to critical illness cover.   Below those adverts is the text:

We do not have a direct link for HSBC Critical Illness Cover. Click here to visit the HSBC home page.

Why would I want to go to the HSBC home page?  I want to see what they’ve got to offer on critical illness, having compared them to others in a table.   What’s laughable is that I try out the HSBC website and they don’t have a critical illness product – they have a ‘serious illness’ one instead.  That’s  a bit pedantic but it shows how weak the large organisations are in assessing where their lost opportunities are.

The big point though is about the box of Google ads that appear because it’s not just for that HSBC line, it happens on all of them.  It looks as if this part of the website is purely there to capitalise on people clicking on the Google adverts, even though it’s not giving them what they asked for.

There’s another point to be made here – in the adverts that appeared only ASDA referred to critical illness in their ad.  Both Bupa and RBS had generic ads that could have applied to other types of insurance.  That is unbelievably sloppy management of advertising budget by the so-called ‘big boys’.  Do these people not measure where their advert clicks are coming from?

Thinking from the perspective of all those companies who have their brands up there on that page http://www.money.co.uk/critical-illness-cover.htm, they’re effectively being ‘used’ as a teaser for people to click on a ‘Best Price’ link that offers Google ads going off to competitors.  Do the likes of HSBC, Nationwide, LV etc. not watch out for this sort of thing?     Clearly not.    There are several losers here:

1. The companies (HSBC etc.) whose names are being used to attract people to click on the adverts of competitors.
2. The Google advertisers who are getting impressions on their adverts but probably low, or irrelevant clicks because they’re not targeted enough.
3. The website visitor who feels conned and thinks only that www.money.co.uk believe this is a good strategy.

Taking point 3 above, that could be the case.  Maybe www.money.co.uk are doing nicely out of the clicks they get on those adverts that appear.  But it does make a mockery out of their strapline of ‘Never Choose the Wrong Financial Product Again’ when the website acts in such a deceptive way.

It could well be that the website has a lot more going for it but from a personal viewpoint I have no trust in the website and it also makes me even more keen to steer away from big brands (such as those allowing their names to be used in that way) because they clearly have money to burn and I’d rather see my money go to someone who can give the personal touch if I want something like critical illness insurance.

Personalising testimonials with pictures

Aegon are a big company. 28,000 employees serving 40 million customers big.  With that many employees you’d think it would be hard to get something wrong on the website.

The screenshot below is taken from the page http://www.aegonse.co.uk/adviser/protection/individual-protection/understanding-claims/case-studies/case2/index.html, which is a case study supposed to get across the message that a customer found it easy to make a claim when their wife died.   The implication is that the man in the photo is the same man who wrote the comment (after all, why would you show a picture of someone else next to something that’s so personal?) …

It’s perfectly feasible that the picture is of the man concerned but if you look at the properties of the picture it’s named as ‘man_portrait.jpg’.  Not Bill Smith, Jack Johnson or anything like that – purely ‘man_portrait.jpg’ – almost as if it was stock photography and not the real person.

It’s feasible that Aegon fully intended to put a male picture there, just to add something to the comment but surely that’d be ‘wrong’ when the testimonial is about something so personal.

There’s a great tool called TinEye (http://www.tineye.com) which lets you input the url of an image, or the page that it’s on and it’ll go off and see if that image pops up anywhere else.  And sure enough, here’s what it came up with:

… which includes a link to Getty Images and the page http://www.inmagine.com/dv1043/dv1043014-photo, which is a royalty-free site.  It’s certainly not a cheap image to buy and perhaps that’s why Aegon used it (so that it wasn’t so obviously a stock image as it wouldn’t show up in many places) but surely they’d realise that some (pedantic) person would find it?

There’s another case study on that site at the page http://www.aegonse.co.uk/adviser/protection/individual-protection/understanding-claims/case-studies/case1/index.html.  This time, a woman looking surprisingly upbeat considering supposedly being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis …

That image, called ‘woman_portrait.jpg’ also appears elsewhere as TinEye unveils below …

There are a couple of points worth making here …

1. If you’re going to use testimonials and link pictures to them then tread carefully.  I only looked up those pictures because they didn’t seem ‘right’ linked to the comments on those Aegon pages.   This makes me automatically think that not just the images have been fabricated but that the testimonial comments may not be genuine either.
2. If you’re considering using images on a website then it’s maybe worth using a site such as TinEye to see where else they appear.  There’s an image that I refer to only as ‘reception girl’ because she seems to pop up everywhere on websites, which confirms that those websites may not actually have such people ready to take calls (which we sort of know anyway!).   You can while away hours putting images into TinEye just to see where else they appear but to make life easier, they have a page of goodies (http://www.tineye.com/goodies) that lets you plug it in to your browsers.

Price differences between email promotion and the website

How to stop people from reading your email promotions: send them something that then has different prices on the landing page of the website.

I received an email today and thought I’d have a look at what was on offer (not that I intended buying any of it).   It’s from a company called Dealtastic and this screenshot shows the main emphasis of what they’re promoting this time:

Note the price of the top left item (Air Powered Rocket – £10).  Clicking on that link takes you through to the page http://www.dealtastic.co.uk/guinness-world-records-air-powered-rocket.html?cm_mmc=Dealtastic-_-SysR1-_-UK-_-20110129, which clearly shows below a price of £15.61 …

So I clicked on the Harry Potter Battling Wand link (advertised for £11.95) through to the page http://www.dealtastic.co.uk/harry-potter-infrared-battling-wand-harry.html?cm_mmc=Dealtastic-_-SysR1-_-UK-_-20110129, which shows it at £14.99 …

So I clicked on the third product (Integral MultiCard Reader – advertised for £5), which took me through to the page http://www.dealtastic.co.uk/integral-multicard-reader.html?cm_mmc=Dealtastic-_-SysR1-_-UK-_-20110129, showing it for £8 …

Going for the ‘full house’, I clicked on the last product and was surprised that it was actually priced as shown in the email.

What’s demonstrated here is that there was either:

1. Poor quality control (no-one should send out an email promotion without double-checking that the details match up with the landing pages of the website).
2. Deliberate deception.

Whatever the answer is, the business owner has made a stupid mistake, that’s now out in the open.  Am I likely to click on future email promotions from the same people?  Possibly (just to see if the mistakes continue).   Would I unsubscribe?  It’s a possibility.  Would the negativity about the sloppiness (or deliberate deception, whichever it is) of the business impact on them?  Possibly (although I suppose it could also raise their brand awareness and some people may decide to sign up to them – so it could do them a favour!).

The message here though is: double check anything going out via email promotion, ensuring that the messages in the email are the same as those on the website.

It costs 55p less but sells so many more

It’s that time of year when people buy fitness equipment in the sales.  Everyone wants something that’s half price but at the same time, they want to compare features.  Take running machines for example – these two below from the Argos website …

There’s only 55p difference in cost between them but a world of difference in their ability to be sold via the website.  The slightly cheaper product is out of stock for delivery but there’s an option to get emailed when it’s back in stock.  It also has 75 reviews, giving it 4.5 stars out of 5.   The other product, which looks very similar, is available for home delivery but it has no ratings.

Which one is going to be of most interest to a buyer?

When you put the two side by side in the Argos site, this is the view you get …

The slightly cheaper product has reviews to look at, and there’s a column of data about it.  The other product has nothing to look at.   There’s also clearly a techie glitch on the right-hand-side of that page.

I dug deeper into the individual products and there was still no detail on the product that was in stock and costing 55p more.

I had a set of criteria when buying a running machine.  It had to:

• Be about £250 (i.e. half price in a sale).
• Be a brand name I’ve heard of.
• Have some reviews.
• Have details of its features.

I would imagine that both of those Reebok running machines were very similar in features (being the same price) but I had a problem – the only one that had any decent information on it was out of stock.  Luckily, I found that there was also a ‘black’ version (instead of the white that was out of stock) so as colour didn’t bother me, I went for that one.

But what of the other product?  What reasons are there for people to buy that when it has no description or reviews.  It may be in stock but who’s going to buy it without any reassurance that it’s a good machine to buy?

It made me wonder whether there are any systems in place at Argos that run checks on product types, and identify those that aren’t being bought.  I’d imagine not because if such checking was in place then the problems would have been identified and rectified so that more of that running machine could be sold.

As an aside, it’s probably heart-warming to smaller companies who sell products via their websites, when they see that big boys such as Argos, with all the resources they have at their disposal, can still get it wrong.

Santa Pause – have you got everything right?

While undertaking research for a client today we found a website that demonstrated the importance of spending more time checking that everything is correct.

If Santa Claus left the North Pole and forgot to feed his reindeer he wouldn’t get very far.  A ‘Santa Pause’ to check they’d been fed would be wise.

A ‘Santa Pause’ would have been useful for Inghams, having created the content for their website.  A pause, in the world of website development is taking a bit of time to run through the whole website to make sure that it’s sending out the best possible message to potential buyers.

By taking a ‘Santa Pause’, Inghams (http://www.inghams.co.uk/santa-holidays/) may have noticed this technical glitch that comes up on various pages …

Moving away from technical glitches (which, after all, could have happened well after the website was created), content glitches are worth focusing on.  We went to the page http://www.inghams.co.uk/santa-holidays/resorts/, which shows two Santa resorts but as you can see in the screenshot below, there’s no difference between the description of each resort …

What’s clearly happened is that the website owner has used the same text for both resorts but this leaves the potential buyer thinking “what’s the difference between those resorts?”.  From looking at the page the only difference appears to be that one has an altitude of 200m and the other has an altitude of 230m.

It’s fair to say that the resorts could well be very similar but the website owner has missed a trick by not taking a ‘Santa Pause’ to look at the pages from the viewpoint of the potential buyer.  In times when we’re used to having systems that let us compare products on websites (e.g. comparing a few fridges on the Comet website) we adopt a mentality that it should be easy to compare most things online.  So, when confronted by two resorts that appear to be exactly the same we think either:

1. the website owner has been lazy by using the same content, or

2. the resorts offer exactly the same

Most people would probably think as per number 1 above and would wonder why the website owner didn’t create content that was unique for each resort, which would help the buyer to decide which to click on to see more details.

Whether a website is new or it’s been updated, double-checking how the website pages will look to potential buyers is a fundamental basic for all companies to do.

Minor glitches – harmless or harmful?

The other day someone tweeted a snapshot from a TV weather report that showed the temperature in Cornwall was -99 degrees.  It was snowy but not that cold and the assumption is that it was either a techie glitch or human error that allowed it to be visible.

Today I saw similar while keeping an eye on the football score for my team, Norwich.  At half time we were winning 2-1 against Derby but then after half time the score changed to 1-0, but showed the 2-1 half time score, along with goal scorers, as you can see in the screenshot below …

What’s happened is either a techie glitch or human error.

Such glitches when discovered in the mainstream media become subjects of a bit of blogging and tweeting but ultimately aren’t the end of the world.  If the glitches were human related, or perhaps also IT related, someone may get a tap on the wrist to encourage no such embarassing glitches in the future.   Such glitches will also generally come to the attention of the ‘glitcher’ fairly easily and so awareness creates the opportunity to fix things.

But what about websites that have relatively minor glitches but are websites where the glitches aren’t picked up on soon enough?  I mean the majority of small to medium sized companies who may have such glitches but they’re not picked up for a stupid amount of time.   For example, an extra digit added to a price, making a product hugely expensive, or something new input to the website that’s thrown something else out of line (but hasn’t been noticed).  Or perhaps a link that goes to a wrong page (or dead page).  There are many types of glitch that can happen, and they can be human or gremlins in the system.   Whatever the cause, if they go unnoticed then website owners run the danger that their product/service level quality may become in doubt if the company can’t even ensure its own website is accurate.

The answers to this are two simple processes that apply to any website owner:

1. Any time website changes are made, get someone else to double-check their accuracy.

2. Have a process whereby website pages that haven’t been checked for a set period of time (this will vary depending on the company) are manually checked for accuracy.

Human error does happen, and so do IT glitches.  By putting systems into place that help to identify such problems within websites, the impact of such glitches can be minimised.