“Oh my gawd. Where have you been all my life?!”

I had just stumbled across a website for a service provider and within minutes, I totally wanted to hire them.

Blog? Awesome. Sense of humor? Huhhhlarious. Services? Precisely what I needed!

I clicked over to the contact page of their website, eager to get things in motion.

No email address. Just a web form where you enter your message.

OK, sure. Sounds good.

After entering my info, a strange captcha-like pop up exploded in my face.

For the record: I HATE CAPTCHAS. Making me do math problems – or identify blurry letters on a gray background – just to prove that I am a human and not a spambot? Ugh. Waste of my life.

But this was no ordinary captcha. This was the Demon Captcha From Hell.

It was a bizarre memory game where you had to select pictures and then remember the location of those pictures and then there was NO WAY TO PRESS SUBMIT.

After about 20 minutes of flailing, I gave up on this #$^&%% web form.

I poked around the website, hoping to find some other way to get in touch.

No email. No phone. No physical address. No social media icons.

At this point, I just gave up completely.

I thought to myself:

“I wonder how many other people ‘gave up’ on this site before me. And does this business owner even know?”

This poor biz owner might be weeping onto her laptop, wondering why nobody ever emails to hire her, thinking she ought to throw in the towel and get a day job already…all because her website is jacked up and she doesn’t even know it!

Let this be a cautionary tale to all of us:

You must – MUST! – look at your business through the eyes of a customer.

Is it easy for people to connect with you?

Is your checkout process seamless from start to finish, including the “thank you for purchasing” confirmation emails?

Is your website littered with program dates that have already passed or other bits of info that are woefully out of date?

When people try to subscribe to your mailing list are they greeted with sad, impersonal stock language that came standard with your newsletter platform?

Do you have weird captcha-like things that feel like a slow and painful death???

Poke around. You might be shocked by what you discover.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Every 3 months (minimum) CHECK THE FOLLOWING THINGS.

1) Your contact page

2) Your checkout process

3) Your email spam folder (just in case an amazing opportunity got sucked in there by mistake)

4) Your customer service process (do people even know how to reach you if they have a problem or a question? where are those emails going?)

5) All the links on your main website pages

6) Your mailing list sign-up process

Because if those sales aren’t tumbling in and you can’t figure out whyyy…

…it might be because there’s something super-wonky on your website that you (gulp) never bothered to peek at or test out.

Sort it out.

And may all captchas broil in the fires of Hades.

xo.

Melissa