A few weeks ago I discussed how the rise in tablet PCs and the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe on the use of Flash meant that if we didn’t make sure our website worked for non-Flash browsers we could be potentially losing customers (here).

Customer experience is everything and if we want to make sure we squeeze every single drop of potential out of a customer visit, we need to make our sites as user-friendly as possible. Of course, there was a bit of a backlash because, regardless of how many people are now using iPads to browse, the vast majority of PC users are still viewing the web with Internet Explorer of which 95% apparently have Flash installed.

But that’s all about to change… Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sobering thought. You know that lovely bit of Flash animation you’ve got on your website, you know, the one that shows all the lovely images and things you sell in a neat slide-show with transitions etc, the one you paid a lot for? What if I told you it was actually losing you revenue?

Yep – losing you revenue. Not just ‘not helping’ but ‘losing’.

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There’s a whole new shift happening in the way people interact with and query the Internet that few web designers or site owners are taking notice of and less are exploiting to their advantage. For years we have only been able to access the Internet by using a PC or laptop that is tethered to a desk with a network cable or trapped within the coverage area of a wireless bubble. Even in cities with lots of wireless access, whipping your laptop out to search wasn’t an easy task and even though netbooks made it a little easier, holding it in one had whilst typing with the other was, to say the least, a little clumsy. Read the rest of this entry »

You barely get chance to take a breath these days before Google releases yet another new feature that is meant to help us in our daily search. A few weeks ago it was ‘instant search’, last week it was an enhanced ‘local search’ and this week we’ve now got website preview. What’s going on?

Well let’s look at it first. If you do a search for, say, ‘news’, we get our normal bunch of results but they now include a little magnifying glass icon next to them:

Click on the result (not the title) and blam – a nice picture of the website you may want to go and take a look at. Is this a great new feature?

Well Bing has had this for a while and I never really saw people say “I prefer Bing because it’s got previews” and I’ve got to admit, I’m not sure it’s an amazing revalation to be honest and I really don’t know how it helps.

Google has always been ahead of the crowd and they made a name for themselves by keeping things simple, this really doesn’t keep things simple and it could actually make the search results a little complex for some.

I’m not sure. What do you think?

It’s sometimes difficult to find an analogy between the normal day-to-day work that us SEO types get up to and what goes on in the news and then other times something happens that just drops a peachy blog item in your lap. Such a thing happened this morning as the analysis of the England performance unfolded on BBC news and various pundits were ask for their opinion.

I suddenly realised that our love of the England team is pretty much related to our love of SEO. Bear with me, it’s not as odd as it sounds…

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Splash pages are utterly pointless. There, I’ve set out my stall and I’m quite proud of my stance.

Now, if everyone believed what I said religiously then I’d firstly not have much to write about here and secondly I’d be a millionaire many times over. I’m not rolling in cash and in the most part people ignore me, so I’d better start explaining my position.

A splash page is a single page that greets the unwary Internet surfer when they visit a web page and it usually (in the least offensive cases) has a nice picture and a ‘click here to enter’ button. What it attempts to do is to impress you with their ability to draw a picture or have a nice animation of a bird or something, I’m not sure exactly why, they just do.

Anyway, in some cases they reach new levels of turpitude by making us listen to some music whilst we scramble across our keyboard for the ‘mute’ button. This usually ends up with my CD being ejected by mistake due to the habit of many laptop manufacturers of making their buttons invisible until touched. Clever, that.

That’s beside the point, what I’m trying to explain is that splash pages are absolutely and without exception an annoying part of the web that I really thought had gone away for good. But they’re still around and appear to be growing in popularity.

But why? What is it with companies who feel they have to inflict their own brand of multi-media hell on those that simply want to have a good look around a site? Why are you doing this to us? WHY?

Even worse are those that insist on using Flash. I like Flash a lot, but only when used sparingly. Flash is superb at getting information across to people in interesting ways and it’s pretty much the best method of viewing multimedia content, but when overused it just gets in the way.

When I view a website I just want to view the information I came to see and then do something with that information. If I have to wait for a flock of seagulls to whizz across the page until a phone number is revealed or even worse – before the page with all the text on can appear then I’m just going to go somewhere else.

And herein lays the rub. People want to get to information quickly and without hindrance and if you put barriers in their way then they will simply go back to the pool of 50-billion or so other websites to find one that does service their needs.

If you have a splash page then do yourself a favour and be done with it. Cast it out into the great trashcan on the web and let your website free so people can enjoy it in all its splendour. Web design doesn’t need splash pages and neither do you!

…but it would be rubbish.

You need a leaflet designing for your latest venture and so you pop to the local graphic designer to have a chat about it. He (or she) says “Yeah, I can do that, it’ll cost you £650 and then £300 for 2000 leaflets”. You decide you can get a copy of Microsoft Publisher for 89 quid and do it yourself. You’re on to a bargain, ‘aint ya!!

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