User Experience Cardinal Sin #1 - Site Under Construction

Today I was contacted by the Revenue Services Group. Who?

Even after talking to the woman on the phone I wasn't entirely clear who these people are so I did what everybody does, popped the name into Google...nothing. That's odd.

She did send me an email a little later and now I've got a URL http://revenueservices.ca/.

(this screen shot is being hosted on ScrnShots - give it a try, very cool service)

I go there and see what looks like a pretty average home page with the words SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION flashing slowly. Oi!

The home page tells me that these guys are "one of Western Canada's SR&ED tax credit claim advisory firms...". It goes on to talk about employing only the most qualified experts and how they know the tax laws.

The catch is that while all the links (navigation) behave as though they are clickable, they're not. Nothing works. There are no less than 22 navigation items, including an FAQ for goodness sake, for me to click on that don't work. All they have is this place holder page and the rest is "under construction".

For those of you tempted to use such a strategy while you build your awesome site, don't:

• Don't show me a bunch of things that look clickable but aren't
• Don't tell me you can't even scrape together some meaningful "About Us" (one of the non-clickable buttons) content
• Don't just give me phone numbers to call from a website, please how about an little info@ email address?
• Don't make claims you can't even begin to support (Revenue Services Group claims to one of Western Canada's largest but then shows me nothing more)
• Lock up all of your content in an unreadable (by search engines) graphic
• Don't tell me the site's under construction (that's so 1998!)

A far better approach is to engage in the fact that your site is an ongoing and evolving project. Even if your 'real' site is 'under construction' you can still deliver a useful and useable online experience, do:

• Do start small if you have to, 5 pages of good content doesn't take that much effort and will do you a whole lot more good on the web than one page "under construction"
• Do tell me who you are even if you have only one page make that page count, offer as much detail as you can, first impresssions last
• Do use "live" content so that search engines can find you
• Do give me email addreses to contact you with
• Do demonstrate that new content will be added to the site by offering new content on a regular basis, this can be blog content, news releases, announcements, feeds from other sites, etc.
• If you're sending out PDFs that describe your business to your customers (as Revenue Services Group is), DO make these available on your site

By the way, this isn't about picking on one company. There are many, many out there committing the same cardinal sin. I'm sure that one day Revenue Services Group will lauch a fabulous site, in the mean time they need to offer their users something a little more useful and meaningful than a static image that makes promises it can't keep.