Brain Wreck: If you are going after the kinds of people who are easily impressed and really love bright, flashy Flash ‘content’, then by all means load up to the point page download crawls even if the poor sap has a full T1 connection. Know thy audience and all that. But to think that only greybeards and Sudanese turn up their noses at that crap is utterly wrong, and your bankbook will reflect that.
kushiel: Not always. To appreciate a lot of multimedia ‘content’ online you need a rather specific software setup in addition to your broadband connection, and not everyone with money is willing to throw it down some corporation’s ‘endless upgrade’ toilet. You can delude yourself into thinking that your logs prove otherwise, but you really have no clue what your potential customers are really using unless your business already dictates a specific software setup.
The fallacy of false choice. While a few gross exceptions exist, the majority of artist-controlled websites won’t saturate a DS1 connection to the point of unacceptible latency.
I trust you’ll understand if I choose not to address an assumption that can’t be disproven without time-traveling into the future and disclosing my personal financial details. Suffice it to say that I’m doing just fine at the moment. Let’s call this one an appeal to fear and let it go at that.
Don’t forget that a little over 10 years ago, JPG plug-ins were separately purchased accessories that many thought were pointless excess, yet now we expect this capability in a browser without really even thinking at it. Time and technology march on, in the absence of artificial restraints.
Good business people don’t “intuitively respect” the latest whiz-bang technology just because it’s the latest whiz-bang technology. They respect whatever will improve their bottom line.
The web designer must show the customer why the “bells and whistles” can be detrimental, and the “good sense of architecture and design” are necessary. Joe Layman might walk into the meeting thinking that his customers want animation and sound, but he should walk out of the meeting a better educated man.
An example: My best friend spent several years doing freelance web design. Very successfully. One of her potential clients was a manufacturer of heavy equipment used in maritime shipping. The company indeed asked for an animated intro, sound, and all that. She explained, with examples, how that stuff interferes with the real purpose of the site–for customers to quickly and easily get the information they need to make a purchasing decision. She demonstrated some of the elements of good web design, like ensuring that any menus were clickable without having to scroll down first. The client had walked in thinking he needed all that Flash or whatever to show his clients that they were “up to the minute,” but soon realized that that stuff annoyed him, so why would his clients like it? Of course he hired her to do the site. He ended up with a starkly beautiful website that was simple and easy to use and adaptable, and was a big hit with customers.
Most importantly, the customer was satisfied that the site would help the holy bottom line.
You have to address the technology that your customers are using now, not what they may have in the future.
Your point that a specific set of customers may be more likely to have certain technological capabilities is well-taken. But I think that depending on it is shooting yourself in the cyber-foot.
Your customer may not be looking at the site from his or her own home computer. Broadband may not be available in his area. His computer may just be acting cranky that week, and your fancy site may crash his browser. There are a million and one scenarios where a person who ordinarily would indeed be equipped to handle the content, just isn’t.
Or maybe your customer is someone like me, who has found over the years that 99% of the stuff that requires downloads and plug-ins just isn’t worth the bother.
Were you even around when the Web began? The “original” browsers didn’t even run on a Mac. Very few sites had “cover pages.” Geocities was hardly an “early software package.”
Splash pages (useless “cover pages” that just show a picture or play an animation) are almost universally detested. Just try building one and putting a “skip this animation” button on it. Then check your stats to see how many people click the button. On sites with a splash page, check how many visits start with the 2nd page (indicative of people bookmarking the page after the splash page).
I also think you’ll find that many of the “arty types” you refer to are quite talented Web designers. They may not understand usability or ergonomics, but the “arty” stuff they do requires quite a bit of Web design talent.
To expand on what **** said, the original Web browsers ran on NeXT Cubes and Geocities didn’t exist until the Web was pretty well established, technically speaking. Web history timeline.