Empower Your Ministry Blog

Amen. Even the stop button should be in a very visible place. Too often I have been scrambling to find where on the page the music is and it takes too many seconds to do so.

Thanks Kevin,

You were one of the reasons we chose not to put a media player on our site intro.

Great advice keep it coming

Curtis Hagy
Brothers Forever

I will make this post required reading for all my website clients!  I, too, absolutely hate music that plays automatically.  Can’t wait to see if your other points match up with mine.

I agree,  I don’t like being in bed or in a quiet place like a library, and view a sight with blasting music. It might be ok if it was like a video that was muted at the beginning, but there needs to be some stop or pause button.

My complaint is of a slightly different nature.  I just visited an artist’s website a moment ago.  I wanted to hear their music.  Shouldn’t samples of music be an obvious component of a recording artist’s website?  I finally clicked on the “Store” tab and found a picture of their one and only album.  There was no listing of the song titles from the project and no way to hear the project.  But there was a big “Buy Now” button….EXCUSE ME?  WHY would I purchase something I’ve never heard?  This was a new group with no reputation to rely on – trying to stir up interest in what they have to offer.  The site itself looked slick.  But no one is going to schedule a group based on the appearance of their website alone.   Sadly, I’ve seen this same disregard for the obvious on well-established group’s websites.  PEOPLE….you’re not selling your vacation photos, your travel agenda, your blogging skills or your favorite recipes…you’re marketing your GIFT:  MUSIC!  We gotta hear to want it.

If you combine Kevin and Marty’s comments you have “perfect.”
Have your music available to listen to, just don’t blast it on intro. Therefore, I recommend that all artists retain their media players (with full songs preferably), but have them set with optional PLAY buttons, instead of automatic blast.

Please tell me you’re going to talk about Flash next…

LOL, Chris…

Let me put my two cents in on flash.  Takes too long to load, you can’t right-click to open in a new window on links, you can’t identify link urls without opening the window (I could go on).  Flash looks pretty (sometimes) but the web is about content first.  Flash makes the content the least important factor of the website.  I had 3 browser crashes this week because of flash.
A little bit goes a long way.

I do not design websites but I would think that if your point in designing a site is communication that you would want to pare down everything that you want people to know about your group so that it is simple. I hate going to website where you have to wait for everything to load before the page will scroll. I have a decent computer with a decent processor. If I have to sit looking at a screen that says “loading” for more than a few seconds when I visit the site the content had better be incredible. People tend to make initial value judgements about the quality of items or websites or people within seconds after their first sensory introduction to them. If that first few seconds of visiting a group’s website is spent looking at a screen that says “Please Wait” or “Loading” their judgement is likely to be that the site and the group it is communicating about is slow and clunky. As the old saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.”

I also hate sites that will not work unless you have the very newest plug-in from flash or some other codec. Or, if you are using an older computer (Win 98 or XP) and the site will not load at all. Build sites that will run on any computer built in the last 10 years at least.

There are website gurus that do studies and they have found that new potential “customers” will only stay on your site for a few seconds waiting on it to load before they move onto the next.  If your site takes 20 or 30 seconds to load you have already lost a lot of people.  Not everyone has the fastest computers or fastest internet connections and that has to be compensated for.  There are nice, tasteful ways to build a site that is professional that doesn’t have a lot of junk on it. 
 
Here is another thing that maybe you guys can speak to.  Again having a college level computer based degree, another thing we discussed is busyness and poor layout.  There are some sites that will remain nameless, that when you bring them up your eyes don’t know where to go.  You are automatically hit with information overload.  That is just as much a turn off to me as the immediate music and flash.  If it is not streamlined and not well organized, I probably will not hang around for long.   I dont want to stay there for an eternity looking for something that I need.  I will go somewhere else and find it.