Sunday, 25 February - 17:36 Category: Design

Death to "Under Construction"

SYNOPSIS: Why is having a page which says "under construction" disastrous to your online business relationship with prospects?

It's funny but sometimes we (the business community) do things which damage our businesses completely unintentionally.  We forget to call someone back when we said we would, we're late on delivery, we're late to a meeting, the list is endless.  And we all know that real life is punctuated by these errors of omission.  Well, here's one which you can avoid making on your website and it will set you aside from much of your competition.  I am, of course, talking about the dreaded "Under Construction" webpage.

It's quite easy to see how you could end up in the situation.  You meet with the web designers before you commission the website, you have lots of great ideas, they have lots of great ideas, they go away and build it and then day-to-day business life gets in the way.  Pretty soon it easier to put up an "under construction" sign on a page than spend two hours writing the copy for it.

In order to understand how damaging this can be it is worth first understanding a critical component in the buying process and that is -- customer expectation.  Very often the quality of the relationship you have with your customer is based on your ability to fulfil the promises you make when they part with their hard earned cash for whatever it is you do.  If you fail to deliver on those expectations customer confidence drops and pretty soon so would your profits.  Of course, you would never do this because the ramifications are all too obvious.

And yet, it is not uncommon when you are searching for a solution on the web to find websites with missing pages, broken links, and pages with the excuse "under construction" written on them.  (To make matters worse this phrase is usually accompanied with some tongue-in-cheek roadworker graphic.  Appalling.)  Firstly, you've broken a promise of delivering some content which the reader was expecting when they clicked to access this page.  Secondly, it raises the question in their mind "if they can't be bothered to get their website right what guarantee do I have they can be bothered to get my order right?".

My plea to you today is this, if you have any 'under construction' areas of your website get rid of them now.  You've got two choices; 1) remove them from the navigation so people can't access them or (and this is the better option) 2) write some copy to fulfil the expectations of the reader.

If you can keep your promises in the online world you will assure yourself continued success.  (And that's my sanctimonious article of the day done!)

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Wed, Jun 25th 2008, 17:36