What small business web design clients want is an amazing list of bells and whistles on their websites. This list never ceases to amaze me for its shortsightedness and its ignorance of what people who surf the web are really looking for. For instance:

• Dropdown/flyout menus with animated images that are built with so much load time and javascript that the menu is the last thing on the page to load, and finally does so long after the rest of the page for people on dialup, which is still half of the population.
• Flash animation, despite the fact that many surfers find blinking, beeping and flashing objects on the screen to be annoying, and the increased load time often will send dialup surfers off in a different direction, never to see what the site owner wants to sell them.
• Navigation done with flash animation, which is guaranteed to kill the site in most search engines, and ensures that people without the plugin or on dialup will never see inner pages with the product.
• A “clone” of someone else’s site, right down to the text, which is copied/pasted out of the “cloned” site, a sure killer in the search engines since they’re written to discount duplicate content, not to mention that surfers want to see something new and different, not the same ol’ same ol’, which is what cloned sites are.
• Functionality like Amazon.com- for a hundred bucks total development cost.
• A splash page that is nothing but an image or image map, and guaranteed to kill search engine rank and indexing; oh, and they want it to load fast.
• Video. Lots of video. With a fast load time.
• Auto-load music. With a fast load time.

Though it’s tough losing a job because you are trying to save a client from his or her own worst impulses, and from what you know to be true on the web, sometimes it’s inevitable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 9:19 amunder Web Design and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.