The Website
This part of the review is encompassing the website during the time of my consult, August 24th – November 17th 2008.


The ForumThinking website should do the following (but is not in any way limited to this list):
  • Provide information about your business
  • Possibly provide information about employees, or becoming an employee
  • Utilize a simple, easy to use, navigation system
  • Look fitting to the business
  • Provide prices, and buying information
  • Customer reviews
  • Correct contact information
  • Appear to be professionally made (even an inexperienced user could do this with a template)
  • Meet W3C standards
     
  • Be cross-browser compatible


The ForumThinking website looks to me like it was done in the 1990’s, in about an hour. I commented to one of my administrators, jokingly, that it looked like it had been done in FrontPage… it was. I could tell because of the look, and when looking at the source, I was confronted with the fat code. When I checked the header it was indeed created with FrontPage:


<head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
 <meta
 <meta
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">


Had I known the site was created in FrontPage before buying, I probably would not have bought any consultation from you. It would have made me do a double take. Of course, I was a webmaster before an administrator, so that could just be me.


That is not to say to change software because of my preferences (I am an avid DreamWeaver user), but the quality of the sites appearance needs dramatic improvement.


I later visited the site with a friend and he asked me if the website was legitimate. I had never considered that part of it. Upon thinking of this, I realized that if I had not seen ForumThinking advertised in a TAZ (The Admin Zone) newsletter I would never have considered buying a ForumThinking consult.





Another issue with the website is that it does not meet W3C standards. The website currently has 15 errors which may cause issues with browsers (display wise, some errors have even been known to cause IE to crash). The ForumThinking website errors can be viewed here. This in itself is unprofessional. A website (especially a business website like yours – for the betterment of others forums) should be error free. As a webmaster myself, I know this goal can sometimes be hard to reach.





The final issue I have with your website is the spelling, grammar, and contextual errors. I will not spend my time pointing these out, but it is plainly obvious to me that it was not put into MS word or another spell checking program. I chose to ignore this detail when I paid for a consult, but all of the above adds up and could thwart potential new clients.





As a note of advice, a business website should always be kept up to date. Clients told things differently or told that the website is out of date or incorrect will lose respect for the company in question.