ABCe: please sort out your terrible website (again)
In March, I appealed to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to sort out its terrible ABCe website. It’s had a redesign. Here’s a list of its latest problems (originally published here).
If at any point the ABC wants to pay me a consultancy fee, for all this free advice, just leave me a comment to tell me how to receive my money …
All the URLs have changed but there are no redirects
New ABCe homepage in Google
They’ve had a redesign, but they haven’t redirected the old URLs to new ones. So, for instance, if you click the second link shown in Google for a search on ABCe, you get page not found.
Lesson When relaunching a website, always 301 redirect your old pages to new ones (even if they’re all just to your new home page). That way, external links still work and you keep the SEO benefit of any links.
They haven’t sorted www vs non www
The more observant will have noticed that the title of the first result in that screenshot says ‘To access IIS Help’. The ABC hasn’t realised that abce.org.uk is not the same URL as www.abce.org.uk. And if you go to the ABC URLs without www, you get page not found or server errors.
Compare these pages:
and these ones:
Lesson When you set up your website, redirect yourdomain.co.uk/whatever to www.yourdomain.co.uk/whatever. And log in to your google webmaster account to set your preferred domain (www or non-www).
They’re running two absolutely identical websites
ABCs new homepage. No, it's ABCe's. No, it's aaaaggghhh
You can access the entire website at www.abc.org.uk – or you can see an identical website at www.abce.org.uk. [Read more]
