Invisible websites

How much did your web site cost you? And how much is it costing you to host it each month?

I ask this because I have spent the past few weeks poring through 842 sites owned by South African Business Warriors. It's a dirty job because a few of these sites haven't had their oil changed since 1995. Yet each of these business owners spent time and money having the sites set up. (Most of us smaller entrepreneurs don't feel we have the skills to do it.)

Was it worth it?

That's the question that stuns me! They don't know.

Imagine that you're an 18 year old female university student. You take your old (six previous owners) VW CitiGolf for a service. Later in the day you collect the car. How do you know that your CitiGolf has actually been serviced?

You could check the oil to see that it's clear. (How do I do that? A car needs oil?) You could check a spark-plug to see that it isn't coated with corrosion and burnt carbon. (Eccch! I am not putting my hands in there. What's a spark-plug anyway?) You could check the air-filter, the radiator, the brake-fluid container, the brake-pads, or any one of a range of things.

You don't do any of these things because you don't know much about cars, and don't want to know about them. Your way of measuring the job that the mechanic did is quite simple. If the car survives until the next service, he must have done a good job, surely?

Welcome to the world of web development. No spark-plugs here. No oil either - just a little HTML guaranteed to deter the most determined investigator. (HTML is the name of the tribe of little people that carry the words down the Internet pipes as fast as they can swim, which is pretty darn amazing if you ask me.) No air-filters - just Javascript (makes the pages even prettier) and maybe a little Flash (which is a kind of digital bling).

The bottom line is that most of us start out by telling a developer that we want a site "like that one" - "that one" being an all-dancing, all-singing, Spielberg extravaganza. When said developer suggests a tentative price (equal to the production budget for Titanic - one of the most expensive movies ever made) we ask how much it would be if we leave off the air-filter, brakes, and downsize the engine. The number can still be quite startling, but hey we're running a business here and you gotta spend money if you want to make money - and this Carruthers oke has been telling us since 2000 you gotta be on the web or else face penury.

When your dealer delivers your new commercial vehicle, how do you know if your site works? Simple. You look at it. You kick a digital tyre, peruse a piece of the code for a brief second and check that most of the pages display. Nothing breaks. You pay your money and you head off West in search of them thar gold-bearing hills.

Which is what most of the South African Warriors did - business owners like you and me. Nice people. My friends.

At least they'll be my friends until this weekend, at which point I have to tell 800 of them that their websites don't work. Those 800 websites are so invisible they might as well not exist.

Why don't their websites work?

I am glad you asked. You wouldn't set up a shop with all the relevant expenses, then paint the windows bright orange so nobody could see inside, hide the door so nobody could find it (or worse, keep it locked) - would you? And would you keep an unlisted number, or stay out of the Yellow Pages, and never advertise?

And that, dear fellow traveller on this fascinating business experience, is the physical equivalent of what my friends have done in cyberspace. I started looking further afield, at a few UK sites to see if they were any different. Nope! (Although the costs are a lot higher in the UK.)

(One out of every ten Warrior sites being checked by Google has the windows painted and the door locked . Google cannot get in to find out what they do.) What Google sees is pretty critical if you want the world's biggest search engine to find your business when somebody is looking for the stuff you sell or do.

A vast number of sites are coded in such a way that they are rather hostile to Google's efforts. At the time of writing this Google can only categorise and search text - those words that are displayed on a page. Google cannot search through that astounding video on your front page. Nor can Google search that single large image your web designer created to guarantee that everybody could see his sterling fontwork.

(The worst site I saw during this exercise is the only industrial door company that operates in a tiny village in the UK. Their site cost £1000 and is a marvel of movement and sound. If you search for "industrial doors" and the village name - you will not find the company site. Their developer is that good! (A few Warriors have sites that come pretty close, however.)

In the next few weeks I will write about the most common mistakes we (and our web developers) seem to make - hopefully in words of one syllable.