Re: Turners Websites......

In message <47db6ef3$0$22885$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Rick Frazier <rickf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
dragonhollow wrote:

Just the opinion of one person, but I used to design and support a bunch of web sites, and I can tell you that many (most?) people hate (or at least dislike) slide shows.

For anyone on a slow connection (still nearly half of the audience out there) a programmed slide show can be extremely time consuming and painful. For the rest of us, it's just more convenient to be able to look at a bunch of "thumbnail" sized images and click through to a full size version if we want to see the details. The thumbnails can be as small as 10 Kbytes each so they load fast, where a larger image could be 100K to a Megabyte without causing significant pain for the viewer.

Unless you are trying to show a very specific progression that requires the viewer to see things in a certain order, the slide show only gets in the way. No matter what slide speed you choose, you lose some viewers because it's too fast, and some because it's too slow. If you are interested at all in selling work via the internet, you really have to allow the viewer and potential customer to pick and choose without having to wait through a series of slides first. Slide shows and related programmed views like Flash also take a lot of yor time to implement.

In short, your audience has a very short attention span, and you need to set up your web site in a manner that allows the audience to rapidly choose the items they wish to view.

As an example, I once had a client that had a good, working site but he got the idea in his head that a slideshow or flash presentation was the way to go. As I didn't agree with his "needs", we parted ways. Once the flash show was in place, he boasted how he got a couple of thousand of hits a day, until I showed him how to look at his site statistics, where he found that his retention on the site was nearly zero. People came to the site due to his (higher and extensive) advertising, but only a half percent or so stuck around long enough to actually go to any of the sub-pages. Yep, though he had very high initial view, only 10 or 15 potential customers ever made it to the second page. Contrast that with the "old" site that routinely got three or four hundred hits on the home page a day (without the high profile advertising), with about half of the visitors exploring significant parts of the rest of the site. The flash which cost him significant time and money to implement actually drove most of his potential customers away... Within a year or so he became frustrated with "the whole internet experience" as he put it, and dropped his site completely.

Sometimes simple is better.



I have to agree on Slideshows. I used to have both options on my website, one Flash Gallery, which was nice and simple to move to the next image, and the other a simple thumbnail version which opened to the full image.

The important thing I did was to advise visitors that if they had a fast connection then they could look using Flash or Thumbnail. But if they had a slow connection it was recommended they only used the thumbnail version. Don't force it on them

Slideshows work depending on what the purpose of the content is. Usually a slideshow restricts all image sizes, to fit in its own framework, but with Thumbnails each image can be size independent

I find if I do encounter a slideshow that I prefer ones where I can manually advance to the next image when I have finished rather than be given five seconds then automatically moved

One very important thing I would say, if the slideshow route is chosen, don't auto start music. When I find a site like that I leave immediately

If only a few changing images are needed to show the range of products a simple Gif animation would suffice. But I am sure there are a lot more newsgroups out there where product specific information can be obtained

Even though I have 8Gb of server space with 400Gb of bandwidth a month, I still prefer to offer my user as simple a system as possible, balancing accessibility against speed. Maybe that explains the fact I get over 16000 unique visitors a month.
--
John
.

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