unsolicited email

I have just received this unsolicited email from a local company and instead of doing my usual "delete instantly" routine, I thought I'd just have a quick look to see what its all about. It turns out to have some very basic sweeping generalisations about building websites, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to add my own opinions to them, maybe you want to post your opinions too?

my additions are in strong italics

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25/05/2007 From ******** ***** at ******* * ******** ***
Mark, You are receiving this email as an e-subscriber of mine
There is a blue unsubscribe link at the base of this email. Many thanks.
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**POINT 1 - I have never subscribed to this, nor asked for my details to be used in this...or any other way by this company, I used the afore mentioned unsubscribe link so hopefully that's the end of it...if not, I'll name and shame!

HiMark

So... what's the secret of best websites?

I know you're busy so we will make this a 4 part course so you can take in small chunks at a time.

1. Your web site has to have content, content, content

Like Location in real estate when it comes to websites it's all about content. The main thing people are looking for on the Internet is information. Not a great looking site. Not pretty pictures. Not games. But information. And plenty of it. Quickly.

Every survey I've ever read (and I've read plenty) comes to the same conclusion: People are mostly online to find: INFORMATION So that's what your site has to have.We've had customers come to us to re-vamp their old sites and after we improve their content (and site navigation) they always report more traffic and interest which converts to actual sales and progress. We train them to keep their websites fresh and updated which gives the web site visitors what they want. Over and over again. If you give your web site visitors what they want, they will return again and again. And recommend your web site to others... which is what you really want

** right, I would agree that information is king, but I would also argue that the quality of information is paramount. It's one thing to deliver "information" but its quite another to deliver USEFULL information in a well structured, interesting and relevant way.

2. Your web site has to load very quickly

By this I mean the web site has to come onto the web site visitor's computer screen quickly.

How quickly ********?

We'll I'm glad you asked! The answer is simple. As quickly as possible. We generally aim for less than 5 seconds on a 56k modem for our web sites. You do need to find the balance between looking okay and loading fast. But if it's a choice between a slow, great looking site and a fast, ugly site it's been our experience that web visitors will take the ugly site every single time. Online visitors are very impatient!

** i have to disagree if we're going along the route of your research which states people are mostly after information, if that's the case, they will visit the site with the most relevant and targeted information to their requirement...pretty or ugly has nothing to do with it. As for users being impatient, this is the case for selective searching of information, perhaps people aren't just looking for a few paragraphs of text online, perhaps they are trying to find images, or a video clip, or a cool game they were told about...in which case the sites they are after will load slower and hence more people use broadband to counter this. anyone know what the current percentage of broadband users is? i bet its lots.

Let's take a look at Google.com the world's most popular search engine. The guys at Google know what their visitors want. They want great quality search engine results as quickly as possible. No hanging around waiting for a huge 'Flash' movie to show, no music in the background, no large graphics to download. Just the information as quickly as possible. So that's what the guys at Google give them. The Google" Home Page comes onto a computer with a 56k modem (much much faster with broadband!) in 2.3 seconds. Our www.******************.co.uk Home Page takes 2.49 seconds to download.

** this is a bit of a cheap shot, google is delivering search results in the form of a link and a basic description from a search form which queries probably one of the biggest cluster of servers in the world...of course its fast. Add to this fact that google is primarilly only a search form, sure its got some cool tools to play with but the vast majority of people using google are there for one purpose, to search for something...the real test comes when the user clicks that link to open a site they are interested in and at this stage I would like to jump back to the "information" debate.

so lets have a look at every other method of delivering information...newspapers, television, radio etc..do these mediums purely concentrate on the basic information?...no...because if they did, they would quickly bore their audience and a bored audience is one that aint coming back in a hurry. Information has to be delivered in new and innovative ways or if it is to be delivered "straight up", it needs to be enhanced with images, graphics and other visual aids..."a picture is worth a thousand words" and all that. Also, people are very used to having information delivered to them in video and audio formats so we shouldn't be looking to deny them this. look at the bbc website for instance, plain text, images, video, audio, games, interactive learning...and its not like the bbc site is losing visitors, far from it.

I also noticed the obligatory "flash bashing" comment in there too, although thats a debate for another day.

• Have the minimal number of graphics **agreed
• Ensure the graphics are 'optimised' (meaning their file size is as small as possible whilst maintaining good quality) as much as possible **agreed
• Don't have too much content on single pages (spread content over a number of pages) **"pages" hmmm depends on both the application and nature of the information i'd have thought.
• Ensure your web developer uses as little web site code as possible **to expand on this, use semanticaly correct XHTML and css for the presentation layer if you are delivering an HTML solution, use optimised fast loading components if using the flash player, if you're using a server side solution such as coldfusion or php, ensure the server side code is just as fast and optimised as the presentation layer, or it will all be for nothing.

And how can you check how long your web page takes to load?
Easy. Just go to this web page and try the free sample of their excellent 'HTML Toolbox'.
http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm

Thats all for today Mark Until next time...

Yours Online

******** *****

conclusion

well, a very vague and sweeping email when it turned up, I've added my initial opinions on this and if anyone else wants to have a say, post it below, if we could collectively generate a new more focussed and targeted version of this, I am game to send our edited version back to this guy, but then again, maybe I should have just pressed delete in the first place as its only because I had half an hour to kill that I gave it any attention, you lot will probably just dismiss it as I probably should have...still, its good to rant!

3 comments - Posted by mark at 2:06 PM - Categories: Ranting

perfect time for a coffee disaster...

got a client coming in in 10 minutes, "great...i'll just finish my coffee and have a quick tidy up of my desk"...oops...too big a gulp and yep....COUGH SPLUTTER CHOKE...my monitor, keyboard and mouse are now drowned in high octane design fuel...perfect....

DISASTER UPDATE

not more than two hours after this happened...mike from east coast interactive managed to spill a cup of tea over my tower and my pda!

honestly...the caffeine gods must have been angry with me today...still, it appears that some people are finding this amusing...am not pointing the finger at anyone in particular...paul from flint media!!

3 comments - Posted by mark at 9:50 AM - Categories: Ranting

beware all sales call people!

We are now so fed up with having our time wasted by unsolicited sales calls ranging from phone, gas and electricity companies(to name a few) and so on, that we have decided to waste your time also....we have a new game which involves keeping you on the phone for as long as possible while trying to convince you of some clearly ridiculous reason why we don't need your product or service. Rest assured that while this is happening, everyone else in our office is laughing at you....you have been warned!

recent favourites have been Stuarts "we dont have a phone, we use a hyperbox" which lead to the sales guy transferring Stu to his supervisor as he'd never heard of a hyperbox but was sure he could get us a better deal, and "no, we don't use electricity"(credit to this salesman, he clocked our game immediately and politely declined to be drawn into the imminent insanity that would have been our conversation) and my own one this morning from an internet marketing company trying to sell us banner ads on an obscure search engine who told me they had one million unique users in the U.K, "that's very interesting", I said. Some people may be impressed with this ability to pull a nice round figure out of the air to prove their point...not me, I was going for the record of keeping them on the phone as long as possible...I asked the poor lady to name them all.....*click* hahaha

so, sales people, the moral of the story is, if you call us up, don't start to question us or argue with us, you'll only get annoyed and we'll all be laughing at you, just politely thank us for our time and move onto your next number...that way, neither of our times have been wasted too much

0 comments - Posted by mark at 10:56 AM - Categories: Ranting

Are you sharpening your crayons?

this rant is back by the insistence of its owner "donkeyspank" who wrote it back in 2004 and has been constantly crying that its not made the transition from my old ubergene blog to this one...so, you little girl, after much digging through old files...here it is!

I bet you've run out of the red one haven't you?! The red one is always the most-used crayon of the whole box. Conversely, the yellow is under-used, but not as much as the white crayon. Nobody has ever figured that out.

It's actually one of those unsolved mysteries of mankind, why they bother including a white crayon in the box... it must be something to do with our early ancestors living in caves.

I bet the cavemen were really frustrated when they were making all those cave paintings coz they wanted to include things like claws, teeth, eyes and such, but had no way of getting white ochre or mud or whatever...

so I can imagine it's one of those instincts of mankind to include a white crayon whenever possible, even though in these modern times white colouring is easy to come by and so nobody ever wants or needs it anymore...

but it's so ingrained in our subconscious minds that we "need" white crayons that if we were to exclude the white crayon we'd have a kind of social meltdown...

and there would be hundreds upon thousands of "creative types" freaking out for reasons that they just wouldn't understand...

and gradually, the arts would suffer, which would have a knock on effect to the rest of society...

before you know it, the legal system would collapse, the global economy would crumble, law and order would corrode away, dictatorships would overwhelm the democratic states and the entire world would degenerate into a whirling mass of chaos and brimstone...

murder would be commonplace, respect for your fellow man would be extinct, we'd all regress to pre-caveman basic instincts...

the structure of our very lives would collapse and we'd all suffer as a consequence...

darker crayons, such as browns and blacks, would gain supporters, cults would spring up from nowhere worshipping the power and might of the black crayon, whereas white-crayon worshippers would be victimised and hunted down, killed, mutilated and eaten in a zombie-inspired flesh-feast...

there'd be no escape either, and gradually mankind would organise small clans of like-minded survivors, and they would hunt down and destroy all white-crayons on earth, and would eventually learn to associate all of the pain and misery not just with white crayons but with all things white...

there'd be no more ice cream, no more seagulls, albinos would be in real trouble, bird shit would be outlawed (punishable by murder, mutilation and mass-eating, zombie style), plastic cups would be destroyed, china plates would be smashed to smithereens, printer paper would all be re-coloured to darker shades like black, brown and possibly dark blue, snow would be banned...

anyone found standing out in the snow would be hunted down, murdered again, mutilated and you guessed it eaten piece by piece in a frenzied zombie flesh feast...

this would lead to all people living indoors during the winter months, which in turn would lead them to seek shelter underground, in tunnels and holes and underground caverns...

mankind would shun the daylight, despise the angry hot shiny god of the sky but would also hate the shiny cold god of the night sky due to it being a shiny white colour...

basically we'd be screwed, all of mankind would eventually become anaemic, skin colouring would pale over the generations due to the lack of exposure to melanin from the sun, we'd all gradually become whiter and whiter, the ultimate nightmare, slowly and inevitably becoming exactly what we'd hate, man would turn against man, there'd be a final global genocide and the straggled remnants of humankind would destroy each other. There'd be no alternative. No other path. No way out.

THIS is the legacy of the white crayon.

You have been warned.

Right I'm off to the boozer now.

rant generated on the 19th Nov 2004 by donkeyspank

2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:04 AM - Categories: Ranting