When I come upon these rare moments of sites being down at just the moment I was intrigued by what they were saying or how they were marketing themselves, I have to use them learning and teaching moments. Like any other moment looking around on Facebook, there are myriad ads and memes to sift through from businesses of all forms. This morning I happened to see a meme shared by a close friend that happened to intrigue me, as it had to do with website development. The clever meme of an extremely old fashion type writer with the comments “Feeling behind the times?” and “Try upgrading your website.” were something I could identify with as I know of several websites that have become somewhat antiquated.

Pretty clever, right? I thought so. As someone who has been involved in website design and online marketing for nearly a decade, I can respect this company for their share worthy meme posted on their Facebook wall, shared by who knows how many people. But, the reason this post has become especially noteworthy to me isn’t for the best of reasons. Quite contrary to the message boasted in their ad and in the title of the blog post they’re attempting to drive traffic to, the link brought me to the following error:

Now, I blurred out the logo, company name and the domain name in the URL because my intent isn’t to shame the website development company I came across. Just more of a cautionary tale I hoped to share regarding business in general. You can plan creative and effective marketing, but if the message you’re portraying is immediately placed into doubt to the consumer/target audience, you’ll have wasted time, energy and money. In the case of this website designer‘s ad, the claims of being able to improve a your website and the blog title in the link “/make-your-website-work-for-you/” were ironically discredited by a blog that isn’t up and running. Granted, the rest of their website is up and running, but I’m one of those rare types that is going to go past the error out of curiosity. Most people who would come across a dead link are simply going to move on to something else.