Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I thought you would find this interesting:

Growing a business website: Fix the basics first

A quote from this:

An e-commerce site lost millions of dollars because overly aggressive homepage promotions made users distrust the price of any product that was not on sale. This is a classic example of the importance of trust-enhancing design in e-commerce.

hi (again) nhgnikole - I still don`t see why, if the SitePal (or other type of) avatar is basically saying the same as what is written as content on the page, why is the more aggressive marketing? I am trying to look at it from your point of view, I really am, but I just can`t see it. You have already agreed that this kind of technology could be useful for the blind, correct? So why would it be any less aggressive if this was used on a website that was particularly marketed for the blind, than if it was a webpage for able-bodied people?

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"If you reach for the stars you may not actually touch them, but you probably won`t end up with a handful of dirt either!"

OK, say you were blind. If you are blind, you probably already have a text reader. So you land on a site with this thing that starts talking the second you land there ... and your reader is talking at the same time.
Only, your reader doesn`t know how to interpret controls on this embedded video. So you have 2 things talking, you can`t turn off the SitePal, and you can`t see the site.

I`m not saying the technology itself is aggressive marketing. I`m saying the way it is used is - when things start talking/flashing/moving/jumping the second I land on the page, it is too much. When people are using the talking head not just to sell their own products or read what is on the page, that is too much. When I can`t read the page because I have this thing that won`t shut up (and I have the sound off on my machine by default - but occasionally I forget to turn it back off and suddenly this noise starts when I land on a page) ... that is too much.

Someone here had the idea of having a button to click that says "Launch shopping assistant" or something like that ... then people can choose to have the freaky talking head to help them shop.

I`m just trying to read the page. I don`t want to be interrupted by advertising flying across the screen, popups, some annoying chick talking, or whatever else.

I guess this is just down to personal choice. Personally I would rather have something read to me than have to read through everything myself. As with anything on a website it is the content that is important rather than the medium it uses. I think if what the avatar has to say is important and relevant, then it is better than having a read only webpage where the content is not well written, the images are not relevant to the text and the whole thing is not well organized so you have to spend the time going through everything to see if what you are looking for is actually on the page.

You do make a good point about the site reader though, but do you penalise everybody to suit the few? As I mentioned before though there are still people out there on dial-up so should all website be made without any kind of Flash or images?


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"If you reach for the stars you may not actually touch them, but you probably won`t end up with a handful of dirt either!"

OK, so for those of you who like to read ... would you mind a little button that said "launch assistant"? Then you can choose to have this person talk to you. Or even just have the box right there on the page, and then you click the "help me" button and the curtain opens and she starts talking! See that I would be OK with.

Like I said, it`s not the technology, it`s the implementation that makes it aggressive marketing. It`s like if you walked into a store and 20 people handed you flyers before you could even make it to the section you wanted - that`s how I see these things going off the second the page loads.

I mean, you don`t go to the podcasting page on SUN and it just starts automatically playing ... you go there, read a short description of the program (maybe a few lines to a paragraph) and then you choose to make the audio start playing. Or the videos on here, you have to click on them - they don`t automatically load and launch themselves.

This comes down to something my father always saw and would point out: the difference between information and gimmicks.

For people who don`t actually have anything useful to do or sell, gimmicks take the place of substance.

So would you not classify certain images as gimmicks on websites? Or even colors? Flash? Perhaps it would just be better to have a white page with text only?

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"If you reach for the stars you may not actually touch them, but you probably won`t end up with a handful of dirt either!"

nghnikole - I think you make a fair point about having the controls on the page and I would imagine the majority of people would prefer that, and as you say it isn`t the technology itself it is more about the application and how it is set up. With my understanding of SitePal the user does have choices in whether to play the video immediately or wait for the viewer to click on a start button. And what the avatar has to say is strictly down to the account holder, in much the same way that the text content is also down to the website owner.

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"If you reach for the stars you may not actually touch them, but you probably won`t end up with a handful of dirt either!"

No, a "gimmick" is the use of something (as in the quote) to *replace* useful information.

I used to think Flash! was a gimmick. Then, posting a topic question, I found out that with proper implementation, Flash! can accomplish things nothing else is capable of doing.

A graphic that shows an actual product isn`t a gimmick---it`s important to the potential customer, provides actual information, and helps close the sale.

SitePal, at the moment, isn`t necessarily a gimmick. But from the examples I`ve seen so far, it`s being used that way. I suspect it`s a lot like Flash!, where the problem is bad implementation. I`d suspect that the originators will eventually offer some sort of "tutorial" or "training" area to help people better implement the product.

I think we are all on the same page, but saying it in different ways (...I think)! SitePal and other website technologies may or may not be useful depending on how they are being used. You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can`t please all of the people all of the time!  SitePal does offer some very good tutorials online, as well as a forum of experts such as this. It is unfortunate your experience of SitePal is so bad, I have seen it used very effectively...in FAQ sections for example where the viewer clicks on a question and the avatar speaks the answer.

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"If you reach for the stars you may not actually touch them, but you probably won`t end up with a handful of dirt either!"