Website Audit: Consulting Feedback Example

Advantage Basketball Camps engaged me in September 2015 for a review of their web presence. What follows is the delivered analysis.

First impressions

First, I don’t even know where to begin, so let me start with broad generalizations, then we’ll get into the specifics. Just eyeballing the site one gets the feeling that back in 2002 somebody asked their neighbor kid or grandson who “designed websites” to design this website for them. Then the fresh-to-the-world-of-coding junior had not yet learned anything about design or standards and just plugged in the HTML code they were learning with some clip art and all their favorite fonts; putting together a site that was already four years behind the times and completely outdated (it looks like it is straight out of 1998). There are no signs whatsoever of there being any web or design standards in use throughout the site.

Keeping up with the times

The site clearly hadn’t been updated in at least 10 years in regard to its basic design and functions. As such, in a fast-paced and ever-changing industry, it was almost extinct, or in other terms: finding yourself on this site is like finding out that you made a wrong turn on your way to Beverly Hills and ended up in Compton. This is the ghetto. Maybe once upon a time it was a desirable place to be, but now you can’t wait to get out. From the lack of clear standards, to the side-bar(s), to the logo, the font(s), the blocks of text, random videos, spinning basketballs, etc… there’s nothing here that gives prospective campers or their families confidence in the organization.

Standards

Standards are a good thing; they let people know where you stand. Web and Design standards are great things; they keep the viewers attention and direct them where you want them while making sure your site works on all devices and browsers. Standards aren’t really seen when they exist, but they slap you across the face when there aren’t any.

Colors

Colors should be dynamic and reflect the organization. They should not take away from the message. While there’s no specific requirement on how many colors should be in use, keeping things simple and complimentary is key (many top designers recommend a base color in grayscale, a primary color, and if necessary a secondary color — it should go without saying that these colors should reflect the organization’s logo). The goal of a website is to provide information (be a resource) and function (allow people to purchase or sign up for goods and services); if the use of color takes away from this goal then color is being used wrong. Colors should also reflect the times. The homepage featured a slew of competing colors: orange, multiple blues, red, blacks, and many of the ads in shades of yellow. There was no standard use of color, nothing highlighted in a way that draws the viewer where you want them. The viewer doesn’t know where to look.

Fonts

Much like colors, fonts should advance the page and make the page easier to navigate. There were at least 10 different fonts in use on the home page alone. There should be ONE unified font across the entire website. In certain circumstances a second font may be acceptable, but in virtually ALL cases, one font is sufficient with bold, CAPS, color, and other tools to highlight certain sections. If two fonts are being used then there should be one serif and one sans serif.

Layout

There are two main layouts that are appropriate for today: Parallax scrolling — a continuous scrolling page with all of the site’s content displayed in a dynamic page — or a site with multiple pages, each of which fits into a single screen without use of scrolling. The current layout was completely outdated with dual side-bars, a large center text area, and a header.

Advertisements

Ads are important and a vital source of revenue, but ads must be displayed in a way that compliments the site. As the ad space seller, constraints can be dictated that ads must comply with (colors, size, font, etc…) or they can be displayed in areas that aren’t competing with the primary function of the website for the attention of the viewer.

Menus

Menus should direct the viewer to the information or function they are looking for. Specifically, there should only be one area to access the checkout link and that is from the shopping cart. The shopping cart should only be accessible from the shopping/store pages, and the shopping/store page should be the link that is in the menu. The menu should also contain an About section, a FAQ, and the Home page, which should be the main purpose/goal/motivation of the business.

Sidebars

Side bars are a thing of the past. Menus are now featured across the top of the page or in a dynamic link in the top corner. Side bars are still found from time to time within sport-related sites, however, they are going away. To stay relevant, moving away from the side bar is key.

Logo

The logo on the home page was also severely outdated — it looked like it came right out of the advanced clipart library. There are cleaner ways to execute a logo, even one featuring a basketball-playing rabbit, that don’t look like they came straight out of Word.

Text

There was way too much text throughout the pages — information overload. The Valuable Info page could be scrapped altogether; almost everything on it had nothing to do with the organization. Text should be limited strictly to the relevant info for that particular page.

Photos & video

There should be a specific page for photos and videos. They shouldn’t be pasted down a sidebar or used to fill space in the main body. They should also be of uniform size and quality. Videos should play in a standard format, such as YouTube. As it stood, there was no uniform consistency, and the videos played in an outdated and often blocked (for security purposes) format.

Competitive position

Scanning the various competitors’ websites, Advantage Basketball Camps’ site was clearly the weakest in its category — extremely outdated, with essentially nothing favorable to highlight about the site on its own merits. In its 2015 state, it was actively losing the battle for attention and driving prospective campers directly toward competitors with more current web presences.

Final Summary

The fixes required here aren’t exotic or expensive. Every issue identified (color discipline, font consolidation, layout modernization, sidebar elimination, logo refresh, text reduction, media standardization) represents basic web hygiene that most professional sites have already resolved. The gap between the site as it exists and the baseline a prospective family would expect when evaluating a youth camp for their child is significant enough to constitute a direct revenue problem, not just an aesthetic problem.