Website Pet Peeves

I have been visiting a lot of websites over the past year. I have decided that there are 3 things that bother me about websites.

Contact Information

It seems like most the websites I visit have at least an e-mail address or a web form, but what is lacking is an address or phone number. For example, I find a website for a company or organization that interests me, but I do not know where they are located without this information. It would be great to include an address or phone number, but more importantly I want to know the city or state (or country) they are located in. Not only is this information important for jobseeker like me, but it is also important to people wanting to get involved in organization or to buy services/products from companies.

Outdated Websites

I can not stress how important it is to update the website for your organization or company. There are many times I go to a website and the last update was over a year ago. Even though the organization or company will probably still provide the same services or products, the information on there is outdated.

How do I know when these pages were last updated? The person who updated the website either manually entered the date of the last update or used JavaScript to include that information. Maybe the news, calendar, or job listings have dates listed.

What if there is no date or year listed of the last update? Well, the information on the page can get confusing. For example, there is a job listed on the website that does not have a date listed. How do I know they are still hiring?

I can write so much more about my opinion on outdated websites. Please keep in mind that even though I hate going to websites that are outdated, I would rather see a website that was last updated in 2000 than a website that has no date of the last update.

Broken Links

There are are 2 categories of broken links - internal links and external links.

Internal links are links to webpages on the website. I usually do not find problems with internal on website. However, there are times when I click on link for learning more about the organization and the page is not found.

External links are links to other websites. Companies or organizations sometimes have a links page. Almost every links page I go to has a broken link or links. It really bothers me when I go to a page and over half their links are broken.

Thinking back to the outdated pages, sometimes the date is listed on the links page. Obviously if the page was last updated in 2000, there will be many broken links.