What Does Your Website Say About Your Company?

Here at Alertra we talk a lot about website downtime and the message that extended and frequent downtime sends to your visitors. Downtime and slow response times, however, are not the only factors that your website visitors will take into consideration when visiting your site. The way your site performs in general makes a very prominent statement about your company. The Fisker Automotive website is a perfect example of this fact.

The Fisker Story

The Fisker automobile company has been the topic of some controversy lately. Some say that the company is headed for inevitable ruin. Others have said that it is one of the biggest taxpayer losses in our nation’s history. After a brief website outage, the company brought back the site with a new look and a positive message, indicating that the company’s future looks bright. The problem is that if the way the site is working is any indication at all of Fisker’s ability to do business, the future doesn’t really look as bright as they would have us believe.

What’s Going On with the Fisker Website?

The Fisker website was recently revamped and the new site hinted at a bright future, regardless of the fact that many are saying the company is headed for bankruptcy and that the few Fisker cars that are on the road will be orphaned cars in the near future. If the site is any indication of how the company designs its cars, it seems that Fisker cars are all about looks with severe problems in function.

It took a while for the company to launch the redesigned website. The site was down all day on April 24th. This was the same day that Fisker and the United States Department of Energy were being reprimanded during a Congressional hearing. There were also two court papers discovered shedding light on the fact that Fisker has quite a few of unpaid bills. One of those unpaid bills was a bill from the designer of the Fisker website and their mobile apps. The papers claim that the company owes the designer $535,000. The unpaid bill may be the reason why the site isn’t functioning properly – and that is one fact that cannot be disputed.

Considering all of the issues surrounding Fisker lately, you’d think that the company would be working hard to make the best impression possible on the public. The company’s website is doing anything but making a good impression, however. If you click on the “Press” tab, the “Contact” page comes up. Try to contact the company using that page and your email will come back to you as being undeliverable. What’s even worse is that when you click “Fisker Story” link, the link goes absolutely nowhere. Perhaps that one little glitch says quite a lot about the company.

A Telling Message

If your website speaks volumes about your company, do you really want your “About Us” or your “Our Story” page to go nowhere? Perhaps it’s the universe’s way of telling us that the company itself is going nowhere. There is no doubt that the lack of functionality on the site is speaking volumes to the website visitors. After all, if Fisker can’t even get its site to function properly, how is the company going to overcome its current obstacles and go anywhere at all?

The Moral of the Story

Even if Fisker isn’t going to be providing us with cars a few years (or even months) from now, it is providing us with a valuable lesson. How your website works definitely sends a message to your website visitors. If your website doesn’t function properly, it’s not sending the right message. All the uptime in the world won’t matter if your site is filled with broken links and gives visitors no functional way to contact you.

While you should definitely focus on minimizing downtime and increasing uptime, you also need to focus on the functionality of your site as well. Performance is just as important as accessibility. Just ask anyone who has tried to navigate the Fisker website lately and see what impression the site has made on them. If a picture can say a thousand words, a site that doesn’t function properly speaks volumes.