Digital transformation baseline · Article 6
The Button That Goes Nowhere
A website's primary call to action has one job — convert a visitor's interest into contact. On the old site, that button — and six others behind it — pointed at a placeholder anchor the page builder leaves behind by default. Not a broken link. A link to nowhere, sitting in the one spot on the page every visitor is invited to click.
Sixth in the digital transformation baseline series.
A link either goes somewhere real, or it isn't a link — it's a button, or it isn't there at all. On the old homepage, the button inviting every visitor to act pointed at a placeholder anchor: technically clickable, and going nowhere.
What the placeholder actually was
Page-builder tools scaffold a call-to-action button before there's a real destination to send it to — a sensible default while a page is still being drafted. The href they leave behind is a placeholder anchor, meant to be swapped for a real page, a real anchor, or a real form once the destination exists.
On the live site, that swap never happened. The primary hero button — the single highest-intent click on the entire homepage, the one asking a visitor who's just read the pitch to act on it — still carried the placeholder. So did all six FAQ toggles, each rendered as a link rather than a real disclosure control. None of the seven went anywhere. A visitor clicking the main call to action got no error, no redirect, no feedback of any kind — the page simply didn't respond, which reads as broken rather than as an interactive control that plainly isn't one.
The part that should worry a business owner
This was not a footer link. It was the button the entire homepage was built to lead to.
Why this is the unexamined default, not a bad tool
Every builder ships this way — a scaffolded call-to-action needs somewhere to point before the real destination exists, and a placeholder anchor is a reasonable way to hold that place temporarily. The defect isn't the tool doing this. It's that nobody went back through the finished site and checked which placeholders had actually been replaced with something real before it went live. That's true of any platform, hand-coded or otherwise — a default nobody re-checks stays a default, however the page was built.
What actually closed it
The hero button now points at the real consultation request page. The six FAQ toggles were rebuilt as a proper disclosure component — a native, keyboard-operable expand/collapse control, not a link pretending to be one — which also means each toggle correctly announces its own open or closed state to a screen reader, something a plain link never could regardless of where it pointed.
The structural fix: placeholder anchors are now a hard build failure, checked against every page on every build, not a manual review step someone has to remember. A link that goes nowhere can't reach a live page again without the build itself refusing to ship it.
The through-line
A dead link in a footer is a papercut. A dead link on the one button the whole page is built to lead a visitor toward is the entire homepage failing at its actual job, silently, for as long as nobody clicks it and notices. The fix here wasn't clever — it was checking that the destination the page implies actually exists, and building a rule that keeps checking after the person who found it stops looking.