What Does Your Website Say About Your Company?
Your co-worker comes back from lunch and you can see immediately that they ate a poppy-seed bagel. They’re wearing their lunch on their face, and this is exactly what’s going on with your website.
Your site takes 5 seconds to load. Probably because you don't have a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
You don't show up on the first page of search results for your own domain. You're looking at your website, but you're not examining the experience of other people finding your website. You haven't paid attention to SEO or the mechanisms by which your site is indexed to showcase your value to searchers.
Your translations suck. So you prioritized adding a new language, and as a result English speakers can see that you checked the box for Spanish. But what if Spanish translations are full of mistakes? When I read your mistakes in my native language, I can see that you don't care about me.
500 server error. Your developers don't write tests. Once they've seen a feature work one time, they're done.
Main menu disappears on mobile. You're not paying attention to your responsive breakpoints, and your menu disappears when you size down to mobile.
No signs of accessibility. You're moving too fast. You prioritize features, but you don't leave enough time to implement them completely.
Your website gets a huge update, but only once a year. Massive but infrequent releases can be a sign that you don't implement CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery).
I have to enter my postal address in two different places. You're not doing user research. Somehow, the user is coming last among your considerations. Making users do extra work sends a strong signal that you have other priorities.
Your <body> is empty. Because you don't render any initial markup, the user has to wait until all assets are downloaded before anything shows up.
Nobody likes to walk around with poppy seeds in their teeth. What kind of friend would we be if we didn't let you know?
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Lab Zero is a San Francisco-based product team helping startups and Fortune 100 companies build flexible, modern, and secure solutions.
