Flash intros rock. Add two of them, and make sure you don’t put one of those annoying ‘Skip intro’ links at the bottom. Heck, if you did that nobody would see Uncle Joe’s mediocre flash skills.
Then, when you finally let the three customers who are willing to sit through your crappy intro into your store, make sure you have a flash product menu, a flash header, and random flash buttons all over the page. Page animations and moving text = Quality and usability, and don’t you ever forget it.
Don’t worry- if that doesn’t slow your site down to a crawl you can always add Java. Sure, most professional developers and customers alike refer to Java as ‘That F&%@*$# Java!?’, but your customers are different. Put random Java image switchers on every page. Put that neat-o Java water ripple effect thingy on your homepage, because that wasn’t old and tired in 1993.
And make sure you require Java along with Flash and Windows Media Player and QuickTime and Comet Cursor to use your site properly. Maybe throw in an ActiveX dialer installer just for good measure- Customers love compulsory ad ware laden downloads and plugins while trying to spend their money on your products!
If you didn’t get the sarcasm in the above, then it might just be that your site needs a makeover and quickly.
Flash, Java, and all that other ‘stuff that moves’ has no place on a productive website. Adding a flash intro only adds another layer of ‘junk’ between the customer and the product info page where the action happens.
Flash headers only make low bandwidth connections slower to your site. Java image switchers literally crash half the browsers on the planet, and moving junk all over your site makes it look like some MySpace homepage.
Look at your 10 favorite shopping sites online. Count how many moving, annoying things they have blinking and flashing and scrolling around. Now look at yours. You might want to reassess if that neat Flash header with the annoying SWOOOOSH! noise every time a page is loaded is really worth it.
The whole point of owning an e-commerce site is to get customers to your product pages as quickly as possible – and then have them click that all important “BUY” button. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING that you put in the way of that is only going to hurt your bottom line.
This post is courtesy of my good friend Jason over at JC Commerce.