A Call for Quality Web Products

Perhaps after many years of referring to the World Wide Web as simply, "the Web", we've forgotten the principle that what gets published to the Web can be seen by anyone, at any time, anywhere. It doesn't matter that the content isn't featured on your homepage - if it's on the Web, it can be searched and retrieved. Yet people still don't invest the time to make sure the quality of their site lives up to brand expectations.

I've worked with many organizations that have documented rules and policies about who has to sign off on a press release, or who has permission to send out a broadcast e-mail, or print a brochure, but not a single policy in place about who has rights to publish to the Web let alone standards governing content quality. As a result, the site becomes a dumping ground of useless information, or worse, information that is just plain wrong.

Web quality may not rank as a priority among managers, but to ignore it puts your organization at risk. Consider a recent situation in which United Airlines saw its stocks drop dramatically due to the rapid spread of a Google News story citing UA's bankruptcy filings. The problem is, that story was originally published in 2002! 

How did this happen? Easy, a Tribune Web site re-published the article without any reference to the original date. The old article was aggregated by Google and the rest is history. In this instance, United Airlines was the victim of someone else's sloppy tagging, but there are countless other situations where organizations have put themselves at risk, simply because there is no one minding the Web.

It's time for management to wake up and realize that your Web presence is a product. Unless you have the proper controls in place, you're exposing a poor quality product to the world.