How not to build a website

We recently received an enquiry for a local catering business. They wanted us to potentially manage their Google Ads and marketing as what they have isn’t working. Unfortunately, we’ve had to decline because their website is so poor, any marketing will be futile. Rather than review their website, I thought I’d share the email I sent them.

Hello Gemma

Lovely talking, but before we could even discuss marketing, we’d need your website up to par. We believe that any marketing will fall short due to the website.

To be blunt, it’s not doing you any favours - I’ll consider the main user journey as an example.

• There are spelling mistakes throughout, such as “Cate Ring” rather than “Catering” on your strap line on the home page
• To find anything about hog roasts, your main service, I need to click “menu”, which is small at the top, scroll down past “Deserts” (also spelt incorrectly, should read “Desserts”), and click on “Hogroast” (should be 2 words)
• When I get to the hog roast page, there’s under 30 words of information for customers to read about your main service, this is not enough information
• I don’t know really know what I am buying and how much it would cost, there isn’t enough information for me to choose you as my supplier. Compare this to your competitors (I linked to better examples)

We’re happy to look at this once the website is fixed, or quote for a new one, and you’d be looking at a starting price of [pricing information bespoke to them].

I see the website is built by [competitor], who offer £99 websites … and this would explain the results. I would suggest this needs to be rectified before you spend any money on marketing.

We’d love to get involved and set you up properly with a full solution, so if our prices suit your budgets then please get in touch and we can start fresh.

Also, we have spotted a spelling mistake in the URL [web address] itself, it is missing an ‘s’ from your company name.

Many thanks

Aaron

A few notes

I have tweaked the email slightly so that it is anonymous, and easy to read to an ‘outsider’.

Interestingly the competitor says “We'll build your small business website in 7 days. Launch for £99. You'd pay £1500 elsewhere, and probably get less”, well I beg to differ.

We were recommended by another local agency, so I’d suggest that our opinions are not unique, and that’s why they passed it on.

We often suggest tweaking clients’ websites rather than a rebuild, but in this instance there really isn’t much to keep, and the system is likely ‘ring fenced’ so we can’t. It needs to much work it’s going to cost similar to a new build.

Worst of all, the errors are still present.

Anyway, here at Webbed Feet we’ll tell you as it is. In this instance we’d rather turn down the work than offer a marketing campaign that won’t work. We can be blunt, but will be fair.