The web is changing, often for the better, sometimes, not so much. I'm weary of the use of "because I can" technology. Not just Flash, but Ajax and the increased bandwidth we enjoy today are changing the web experience and too frequently getting in the way of it.

A few years ago, I had the priviledge of working with Paul Pontalier and the team at Château Margaux. Everyone I met at Margaux was charming, generous and intelligent and I was delighted to spend time there talking to them about their site, which was based on Flash and .NET technologies at that time. At the time we made a few small adjustments and they eventually moved to a less edgy design.  I am recalling this now because of one particular discussion I had there with Paul and Corinne and I think my point is still valid today.

The Guided Tour

When you go visit Margaux or most other properties, you are on a guided tour. The vast majority of visitors to a web site do not go there for a guided tour. In fact, isn't the whole point of today's web to personalize the experience? It's great to have a large gallery of high-definition photos and videos. Do you want to wait while they load, or would you like to find what you came for without a musical spectacle? I like to have a door that I can go in if I want to look at those. But what if I've already been there and I just want to know how the 1999 is doing? Or maybe someone from the press is writing an article and wants to know who the second winemaker is or some detail such as how to spell a name? Every sexy design feature I have ever found on any web site could just as easily have had an entry and an exit. By the way, since bookmarks don't work, they should be built in to the navigation so that you can save them on the site.

There is such a thing as too sexy

I think we're losing this battle to the overly cosmetic designs. I don't really want to see sites that bat their eyes at me, which is the equivalent of those idiotic menus that move when you try to click something. Sure, elegance and a sense of mystery is needed for the luxury wines, but is this any reason to have the practical information is less obvious places? That's like pretending elegant ladies don't ever go to the bathroom. These menus are also problematic because while they work fine on the designer's screen, many of them do not track the mouse properly resulting in having to keep racing around to keep the text or icon from hiding behind some cute facade. Designers also always have large screens and some sites when viewed on some screens lost the bottom lin of navigation! "No matter, we're not aiming at people who don't have a big screen."

At least once a year, someone in the wine business trots out: "Look at Petrus. They don't even have a site!" I don't see that as something to brag about, but then I'm certainly not the target audience of such a wine. When I read these lines I think to myself, "I must be an old curmudgeon!" until I remember that every survey of opinion I have seen on forums about web sites, not just wine but any sites has the majority of votes "better without Flash" and "prefer not to see opening autostart music and animation". I can only add that it shouldn't be so hard to make a user-friendly Flash or Ajax site but I think few people, whether designers or their customers, have followed the best advice ever given: "Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor, the kind of visitor you are building the site for."  Over the past 15 years, I've never changed my philosophy: the site you (think you) want is not necessarily the site you need.

Whether it's your company web site's news page, blog posts, mailings or Twitter, there are some basics that even I know. I break these rules all the time, but I am not a company trying for a particular effect, I'm just alive and online. Sometimes, people have asked advice on these things, and usually they don't listen.

1. Use lots of lists of tips with titles that begin "10 things". How can this still work? I'm pretty sick of seeing these, but I guess there are new suckers punters born every day. You came here and you are reading this, right? I have zero authority in this area, so I guess the theory about "10 things" is true.

2. All kidding aside, please study titles and make one that doesn't put people to sleep. Companies love to have long headlines with too many adjectives and superlatives. You want good SEO and people reading? Say "Arhtur Frobisher Innocent" rather than "Fifth District Superior Court Aquits Arthur Frobisher in Long Trial". Better yet,  "Frobisher Aquitted". If they don't get the Frobisher reference, they don't care anyway.

3. No one really reads web pages except search robots and spiders. You care about them because you want good listings. Humans scan the pages, they rarely read them. (see 4 and 5 below)

4. Forget positioning in search, go for pertinence. I just did a search on Tropo cloud voip on Google, Bing and Yahoo. If you wanted to find the guest spot tropo did on our voip conference that would be a reasonable search, and the answer you want comes up early not because of positioning but because of pertinence.

5. When humans scan pages, it is said that the first 12 characters of the title will retain the attention. If the very first part of the title isn't compelling, most people move on, according to (I think) Jakob Nielson.

6. Don't make people register to read your stuff. If it's a white paper and it's seriously worth reading, maybe have it mailed to them. If it's on the web as pages or a webinar or slides, most people are loathe to register. Unless I know there's gold at the end of the trail, I'm out of there if registration is required. Make your stuff embedable, someone was kind enough to teach me this not all that long ago. (thanks, Ryan)

7. Look to your skies for a warning. Has anyone figured out yet why I keep saying this and what movie it comes from? Good! Now, look at Chris Brogan and a dozen other very high visibility bloggers. Chris gives away more good info in a single post than most people have in their registration required stuff.  People like Chris and Seth Godin and Louis Gray must be getting something out of all the good information they put out there, so look at how they operate. "Cop and Blow" is the musician's term for this. That's what creative people do, study what came before.

8. Make the links and indeed your domain name refelct what the article is about. In Wordpress it's just a setting that change links so they have words in them. WP lets you make this anything you like. It chooses the title words by default. Consider building your own short URL service that lets you do anything you like. Here are a few examples:

To when the next VUC session is, http://vuc.me/next
To join the IRC channel on the web: http://vuc.me/irc
VUC mailing list? http://vuc.me/mailinglist

9. Hmmm, still need two more for my "10 best" list. Ok, here's one: Ajax is wonderful and even Flash can do good, not just evil. You need to think of the users, not yourself when you are building a site or writing an article. Another great Nielksen comment is that people spend 99% of their surfing time on other people's sites, not yours.

Flash: consider if it might irritate the audience to start music playing on each visit. Do not make menu items move around, no one likes this. No one. Most Flash programmers' portfolio sites do this though. Be careful about screen size, yes, most people now have 1280 or more screen rez, but a lot of people still use 1024 with large text. Too many Flash sites have invisible navigation because they are too big. Flash designers as a whole, are creative in everything except trying to put themselves in the place of someone looking at their stuff.

Ajax: don't break the main conventions of the web, such as hitting enter to submit (unless there's a reason for it, and sometimes there is) and using tabs to navigate fields. Just because Ajax is hipper than MSIE doesn't mean you can ignore important standards, ways people expect to use your site.

10. Ok, you've almost gotten through ten whole concepts that many people I know are having a lot of trouble digesting, not counting the Flash programmers. Here's one last thing to think about. Content is king. It can't be said enough. The bloggers I mentioned know this, they have made it an art to stuff every single post with tons of good info.

Did you learn one thing from the above? I continue to see the same mistakes in Flash sites, the same bad corporate blog titles, the same watered down content, the same mistakes made in spite of the fact that these things have been pounded to the ground for years.