We’ve seen it many times – people who are reluctant to share their web site address. There are a lot of excuses given. Some of the most common ones include:

• The site was developed a few years ago and left untouched since then because:
  • No one knows how to use HTML
  • No one knows how to use the proprietary content management system of the original developer who since went out of business
  • The person who was in charge of the site had a nervous breakdown and hasn’t been replaced yet 
     
• The site wasn’t taken seriously when first developed because:
  • The company owner knew the Internet was just a fad
  • We figured all we had to do was create an image map of the current marketing brochure
  • The marketing budget was already fixed, and the Web committee only had $1,000 to create a web presence
    
    
• There isn’t enough time to fix it because:
  • The company’s marketing cycles mean there’s no down time
  • The university is either in class (when there’s no time) or taking exams (when there’s no time) or on break (when there’s no one available to work on it)
  • Recent budget cuts mean everyone’s doing two other jobs besides their own
    
    
• It’s been undergoing development or redesign for a couple of years now because:
  • The VP’s 12-year old cousin did the first iteration and is working on the second but he’s older now and is more interested in girls than in computers
  • The committee in charge hasn’t been able to get their calendars in sync since 1999
  • In the past three years there have been three different people in charge of web strategy, and each one took a year to create the strategy plan

 As a public service to our readers, we’d like to offer the following messages. By posting these on your Web site, we hope to help you mitigate this deep-rooted sense of shame: 

• Come back in a couple of months. We’re not promising we’ll have a new site for you to visit, but we sure know we should.
  
  
• See how hard at work we are? We can’t even keep our site up to date! That’s because we’re heads-down and client focused!
  
  
• If you want to see all the new products we have to offer in a cool new presentation, visit our competitor’s site and then use our 800 phone number to order them all from us! We promise, just because they have a more sophisticated Web site doesn’t mean we don’t have the same products!
  
  
• See how considerate of your time we are? We’re not guilty of adding to information overload. We promise, you won’t even find what you’re looking for here.
  
  
• They say the sign of a creative mind is a messy office, so our disorganized Web site’s just a sign of our innate creativity!
  
  

Not working for you? Really? Well, maybe it’s time to get serious about solving the problem rather than hanging your head. If so, send Len an e-mail message at len@imediainc.com, and we’ll help you past the many organizational hurdles to a site you can be proud of.