In conversation at this year’s Online News Association conference, a fellow Chaser remarked about the weight of the home page on the Web site he helps direct.
It’s way over 300k, he lamented. And, for the nontechnical Chasers among you, that’s a lot. That page would take more than a minute to load fully at typical modem speeds.
Still, he said, more than 80 percent of the site’s audience uses a broadband connection. So it’s not a problem — except he and his team can’t decide whether the broadband ratio makes the page weight moot, or the page weight makes the site impossible to use for anyone but a broadband client.
In other words, his crew debated whether serving a 300k page is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe it’s just a way to ensure that the unwashed masses of slow modem users steer clear so developers just don’t have to think about page weight anymore.
This isn’t a technical advice blog, so we’ll steer clear of describing the many available solutions to this dilemma. Short answer: our colleague’s site could have it both ways, serving high-fidelity content and visuals to the broadband crowd, and lean-and-mean tidbits to modem and mobile-device users.
Other examples of avoidable self-fulfilling prophecies:
- “Our users don’t bother with our customer service pages, so why bother updating them?” Help pages that don’t help are a waste of disk space. Ditto for customer interaction pages, such as subscription sign-ups or product orders, when they are also full of distracting banner and tower ads. The point of customer service pages is service, not sales. Maybe it’s time to eschew ads on those pages for the same reason car dealers keep their sales people out of the service waiting room.
- “No one can find this-or-that feature on our site, though it is linked from the home page.” Sure it is, along with 200-300 of its closest friends. Chances are, many of those links have been designed into graphic tiles or other attention-getting devices — but probably designed independently of each other. The net effect resembles Times Square, Tokyo’s electronics row or any minor-league outfield wall. Message soup.
- The ad intrusion arms race. Web consumers became blind to old, small banners and tiles in recent years, much the way TiVo users zap through TV commercials. The industry’s response? Larger-format ads and more intrusive time-based formats, such as interstitial ads. Users’ response? They’re quickly becoming blind to the larger formats, while permission-based programs such as e-mail marketing continue to thrive.
The point to remember is that the way we present information to consumers affects their use of it and decisions about it. So if the only way we media types make management decisions is to study user behavior in the environments we create, we fall into loops of logic that are tough to escape.
For Chasers, that’s the same as chasing your tail.
