As you may or may not know we sometimes dabble in web design and promotion for some clients. That part of Toni’s business normally focuses on local clients so we’re always interested in what the local competition is doing.

You’ve probably seen me grump about the competition here before. They all walk the walk and talk the talk but their level of expertise leaves something to be desired and the latest example of that came to light over the weekend.

We saw an ad for a local small business that displayed a URL so we decided to have a look at the website. We actually know this small business quite well and we know that they have never mentioned a website in any of their advertising before.

So we were surprised to see this tucked away at the bottom of their site:

Notice the number of visitors the site claims to have had since May 2005?

Not a bad number for a site that is so new that you won’t find it in Google and Alexa has no listing for it at all. It’s also so new that web.archive.org has no listing for it either.

I wonder why web design companies have to resort to things like this to try and impress potential customers? Research shows that potential buyers are often impressed by other factors on a website other than this little bit of propoganda.

It’s also apparent that the designers may not be aware of the latest research about shopping carts – the more steps between identifying the items a surfer wants to purchase and the actual checkout point there are the greater the number of potential purchasers who fail to complete the purchase.

Ah well – one day we might be called on to rescue this website too – it seems to be a growing part of our business.