Would You Develop And Launch A Site Like This?

Hi Everyone,

We have been asked by a 15 year old website to help them with their web presence. The website is for news...it would fit into the magazine/publication/news category. Their primary revenue stream comes from advertisers.

After we started to dig into this project we were shocked that in 2015 a website would be launched with the following not being planned or implemented.

Quick background

Client's new website was just launched in April 2015 and they spent over $20,000 to get the below problems. The company owner is 60 years old and not tech, web, or digital savvy. The web development firm has been working with them for nearly the entire time of their existence, therefore, they are more than familiar with the owner's understanding of this industry.

Issues Identified

• Website is not mobile friendly
• Website is missing structured data
• Website is written in table based code
• Website is missing a complete XML sitemap. Was finally created 3 months later and using a free sitemap generator with missing information.
  
• Website is missing OGP and is not social community friendly
  
• Website is a basic two column theme…old style narrow width
• Website is does not have SEF URL’s
• Google Analytics code was not installed at the time of launch. It happened 3 months later.
  
• 301 Redirects were not setup for thousands of web pages. Original website had over 22,000 pages indexed by Google.
  
• UX and UI featured were not planned or developed for a magazine/publication website. Client was not necessarily advised as part of this project plan.
• Website is built in ASP on MS IIS 8.0 server
• While this might be controversial for some...the website does not meet W3C compliance either (let's call this icing on the cake).

Your Thoughts

Would you launch a client's website in this fashion? Would you recommend this type of site to your client? Web developers, designers and/or marketers, please share your opinions.

 

There's some good points and bad points there, I really need to go through that list one item at time to explain my stance on these 'issues'.

>> Website is not mobile friendly
There is no excuse for this in todays world; honestly there's been no excuse for this for over five years. This is more true since responsive layout is just the last in a long line of stepping stones we've been told for almost two decades to do that a LOT of "designers" and developers have been willfully ignoring, scoffing at, or saying "wah, wah, is not so" just because they're too stupid to understand it.

Blame for this though could equally lay with the client! Clients often get their hearts set on layout concepts or ideas that have NO business on a website in the first place. The more you work with the client, a clearer picture may emerge that

>> Website is missing structured data
Not sure what that even means... are you talking navigational difficulty, how things are stored on the server-end, that's pretty vague.

>> Website is written in table based code
Which bascially means the developer never extracted their cranium from 1997's rectum. Sadly all too commonplace particularly with HTML 5 throwing STRICT in the trash and dragging development practices back to the worst of the browser wars and HTML 3.2

... this is where you REALLY start to lose me:

>> Website is missing a complete XML sitemap. Was finally created 3 months later and using a free sitemap generator with missing information.
IF all the pages are properly cross linked across the site so normal users can navigate to them through links without rel="nofollow" or any other such asshattery involved, sitemaps are an utter and complete waste of time and they'd be better off WITHOUT ONE.

To put it plainly, they are pointless redundant BS used by scam artists to make it look like they are doing something meaningful. If the site is built properly XML sitemaps serve NO legitimate purpose! I'd just delete it and let the blasted normal links on the page be spidered normally.

>> Website is missing OGP and is not social community friendly
There is only ONE opengraph value that's worth a flying purple fish, and it's the one that lets you set the picture social media will use next to the link to your site. That's IT. The rest of them are either redundant to existing content or META, or NOTHING actually uses!

Missing it in it's entirety? Not a big deal -- for the most part OpenGraph is more waste of bandwidth than it is adding useful information to a page; you can plainly see this when most people just copypasta from other existing tags like TITLE and their headings, or from other META like keywords and description.

It reeks of the same type of nonsense as Aria roles and microformats before them; more meant for "data scrapers" (a polite way of saying "content thief") than it is of legitimate use on a website.

Website is a basic two column theme…old style narrow width
I'd have to see it to say a whole lot on that -- but I'm assuming when you say narrow width you also mean FIXED width. Fixed width layouts are nothing more than developer ineptitude and have ZERO place on any website EVER written, particularly since max-width was introduced. The ONLY legitimate excuse back in the day was "at 1600 long paragraphs got hard to read when fluid" -- with max-width there is no reason not to build a semi-fluid elastic layout other than ignorance, apathy and wishful thinking.

SADLY most of your art faygelahs vomiting up designs via PSD have NO clue what any of that means, so it's STILL not uncommon to come across mouth-breathers doing it -- yet CLAIM they aren't because they don't actually understand accessibility or design. Same goes for a lot of back-end coders who don't know enough about the front end to write PHP or ASP that outputs even one blasted line of markup.

>> Website is does not have SEF URL’s
Since search engines never really gave a crap beyond the domain name, this isn't the big show stopper you might think. In the case of sites with LOTS of articles of similar names, it's often better to link via article number than by title.

REALLY the "friendly URL" isn't for search, it's for users who don't trust the TITLE attribute or the text of the link, or so it can be hotlinked without adding that text. Like a great many things if you use them it should be for the user's aid, NOT just becuase search MIGHT (and usually doesn't) see a keyword there.

>> Google Analytics code was not installed at the time of launch. It happened 3 months later.
Honestly, big deal! I don't even use GA and in fact, I don't even recommend it. Waste of time, waste of bandwidth, and obsessing on information that to be brutally frank if you can't pull it from the server logs with tools like analog or webalizer, you probably shouldn't even be troubling yourself over.

It's a giant lie that just gives Google more power and gives SEO scam artists more statistics to card stack to support their outright lies, dimestore hoodoo / five and ten voodoo.

>> 301 Redirects were not setup for thousands of web pages. Original website had over 22,000 pages indexed by Google.
This is something I've seen site owners obsess over, but honestly those legacy links after fifteen years probably contain a LOT of web-rot. I would go into the server logs for a month and look at how often any of those pages are even being hit. If they aren't, don't waste your time worrying about a little lost mojo on them.

BUT, if they are high traffic, then there's no excuse. Assuming there was a CMS or at least something RESEMBLING a sane storage scheme for the links, moving the old pages into the new system should have generated those 301's all by itself. If that couldn't be done, it was being done wrong!


>> UX and UI featured were not planned or developed for a magazine/publication website. Client was not necessarily advised as part of this project plan.
Again, no clue what you even mean by this. Not sure if it's the broken Engrish, or that I just need clarification.

>> Website is built in ASP on MS IIS 8.0 server
Well, that probably also means it was sleazed together in Visual Studio by people who have no damned business even making websites in the first place. The markup is likely a bloated mess wrapped in a pointless "form for nothing" with ASP automatically linking in hundreds of K of "scripttardery for nothing".

Worse, it locks them into a single hosting platform with little practical scaleability.

>> While this might be controversial for some...the website does not meet W3C compliance either (let's call this icing on the cake).

For the template/theme itself on an HTML standpoint, there's no excuse for this. If the people working on the sites are re-re's not qualfied to write web content and some goofy WYSIWYG or other editor is on the back end, then the content is going to have a LOT of bad markup and there's no avoiding that... but really the base markup that content is plugged into? ZERO excuse other than developer ineptitude.

THOUGH, a lot of crap people "want" for "functionality" does end up being slapped into pages that's invalid just because the client demands it, regardless of how badly it pisses on accessibility or actual functionality. See the dumbass "target" attribute shoving new windows down users throats, or the blasted IFRAME bull that OBJECT was supposed to replace.

Overall it would really come down to how many errors are present and of what type.

CSS Validation though? Utter and complete pipe-dream. Between old vendor specific values needed to support legacy browsers, and the stupid malfing halfwit vendor prefixes like -moz and -webkit that are NOT part of the CSS3 specification (no matter how many ignorant fools call them CSS3) you ARE going to have invalid CSS -- so it would really come down to what errors are being reported, which ones can be dismissed and which ones are legitimate concerns.

So really those "issues identified" are a mixed bag. Some legitimate concerns, some serious problems, and some things that are just fairy tale nonsense.

As to launching a website in said fashion? Over 90%+ of the websites in circulation I'd NEVER have launched in their current state given the endless pointless scripttardery, willfull ignorance of accessibility minimums, utter complete lack of graceful degradation, and painfully slow loading times that makes pages today slower and less useful than they were 20 years ago on dialup.

Which is why for a great many users the current state of web development feels like site owners and designers basically telling visitors to said websites to go plow themselves.