Dead? No, just resting
17th July 2008
By Chris Rand
It’s amazing how many companies discontinue products (or entire manufacturers’ lines) and just delete all the relevant pages on their websites. D’oh! No, no, no, no and no.
Imagine you had two adjoining exhibition stands, where you’d planned to separately display your traditional red widgets and your newer blue widgets, and you’d put out a lot of publicity in advance to potential customers of both types. The day before the show, at a strategic meeting, it’s decided that the company will no longer be selling the old red widgets. What do you do?
[1] Leave the red widget display as a big blank wall, with just a notice saying: “Are you a potential customer of our red widgets? They’re not here. Go away”; or do you
[2] Use the space to point customers towards the blue widgets display.
The red widgets have a following which you’ve painstakingly built up over the years. Are you really just going to throw that away? Outdated but Powerful Pages: How to Handle Them on Search Engine Journal discusses the approaches you might take. This is exactly the sort of subject we’ll be covering in our Insider Programme soon: watch this space for details.
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