With all the recent talk about ADSL2+ and the like, I hear so many IT companies talk about all new features, I also see web developers salivating, thinking of all the cool new things they could put on websites. This is another reason why so many people just don’t get it, when it comes to the Internet.
Yes broadband will give consumers the chance to do many things, VOIP, movies, music at the speed of light, but one thing I urge all agents not to do, is to think of it as a way of adding bulky features to your site.
A case in point, my system is going through an update for the past 6 months, now even though broadband is going strong here in Australia, my brief to designers and developers is speed and functionality, in fact at the moment the system has no graphical component at all.
My clients want a useful tool, that is it, if it is not useful they will go elsewhere and I will just be another know-it-all sprouting my mouth off.
Websites are a different beast than systems, they are your window to your customers, your website should be branded effectively and should be clean and easy to use.
But when you add new features such as movies and VR Tours, give the user a choice, make sure they get to choose to do things such as download movies, or PDF files etc.
If you are going to have added features then follow these rules.
1. Always let the site user know what it is they are downloading if they click on a particular button. One of my pet hates is a link that goes to a PDF file and ends up loading another program which I have to wait around for ages for it to load! Dumb.
Example 1.Click here to download brochure (PDF File)
Example 2.Click here to download Virtual Tour (Macromedia Flash)
2. Always tell the user the size of the file. It is no good downloading a Movie if it is 20 megabytes in size and the user is on dial up.
Example 1.Click here to download brochure (64k PDF File)
Example 2. Click here to download Movie (2025k Windows Media Player)
Summary:
Give your site users a choice and let them know what they are doing if they click on a link and the size of the file that will be downloaded. Do not think of broadband as an excuse to make your site slow for dialup users (still in the majority)