The e-commerce industry is beginning to learn the importance of good housekeeping as they find many ‘linked’ pages that don’t work simply rot and turn off sales.
Link Alarm Australia revealed that ten in 330 of Australia’s top sites suffered link rot last year, leading users into dead ends and frustrating potential customers.
The Australian Financial Review reported that the American market risks losing $US1.8 billion due to poor web house cleaning, but if conditions are maximised it stands to turnover $US3.2 trillion.
It becomes more evident, as the industry matures, that professional and on-going web management is needed to sustain industry growth.
What currently interests industry leaders is link rot, where external or internal links to pages fail.
This, along with other factors such as the slow download time which is estimated to cost one in three sales, is creating headaches in an industry rapidly realising the cost of poor web management.
Managing director of Australia’s Dunbar Harper Hamish Jolly (www.dunbarharper), who offer free online link analysis, says: “Really successful websites are constantly changing.
“If you have fifty or more pages, the size and complexity of the task can be quite daunting.
“However it’s worth making the investment in quality control because poorly maintained sites can lose substantial amounts of business and reflect badly on your organisation”.
