The Mongrel dog
A mongrel has obscure and uncertain ancestry. It's impossible to tell what characteristics the dog will exhibit. Often such a dog will show the behaviour of multiple parents or grandparent. On the other hand, behaviour can be unpredictable to the extent where the dog turns on it owner.
You can easily misinterpret what a mongrel's likely behaviour will be. It may be easy to train or impossible. A mongrel may be tough and resilient, healthy or sickly, friendly or vicious, or be so nondescript that it's not much good at anything.
Mongrels can easily turn out to be scroungers as well.
The Mongrel website
Websites of this nature are frequently the result of an uneasy collaboration between a designer and an IT/computer person. Alternatively, one developer may have started your website and another, with conflicting ideas, has taken it over. Often, the website has been band-aided with add-ons that either work well but look awful, or look good but don’t function properly.
Your core business goals are usually ignored, unattainable or forgotten, as each participant tries to do their own thing. They're usually unnecessarily expensive to maintain.
Customers can't recognise whether it's a working website, a marketing website or an edifice to some designer's skill. Different pages have different personalities, which may be mutually exclusive. Often the website has no particular characteristic at all, and visitors leave confused or alienated.
Visitors are never sure what type of business they’re dealing with, other than one that's unclear about itself. Efforts to turn the website into a productive business tool are usually fruitless and you might not be able to track down the person responsible for the behaviour you’re trying to fix - assuming, of course, they could.
Search engine optimisation won't help either - all that will do is generate more traffic to a website that people don’t like or can't understand.
One thing’s for sure about mongrel websites - they do more harm than good for their owners.
Are you about to buy a mongrel website?
Signs that you could be buying a mongrel dog:
- Complementary off-line business strategies are not asked about
- You're not asked about business goals and strategies.
- You're not asked about your customers and their needs.
- You're being drawn into technical discussions.
- You feel that your business needs are being sidelined.
- You're being bullied into accepting things you don’t understand.
- It feels complicated instead of simple and straight forward.
- The conversation is dominated by talk about search engine optimisation.
- The provider talks as if having a successful website is about programming, computers, graphic design and IT.
- A particular technology - the developer's favourite or the only one they understand - is pushed.
How to ensure a thoroughbred website
SnapSite will work with you through each of the important steps to website success. We can help you develop operational and strategic business battle plans that will give your business the potent advantage of having more than just a website.
Snapsite provide strategies, systems and services to take your business beyond the limitations of just having a website