It’s October, my favorite month and I’m trying to infuse all of my web design writings with its vibe.  The weather’s just great (Autumn cooling the streets off, shades of red everywhere), there’s lots of caramel-coated apples and, of course, there are horror movies.

I was really looking forward to see a certain flick (it looked just so cheesy… and I’m a fool for zombie movies) and it surprised me how much can be accomplished during the trailers.  I went to the bathroom, washed my hands (remember: safety first), bought me an immorally huge bucket of popcorn and a humongous soda (light soda, because I’m hypocritical like that…), stumbled into a couple of friends who came to see the flick, had a small argument about who was the best zombie director (Romero or Fulci) and, after walking through endless corridors and steps, I got back to my sit and enjoyed the movie.

Attention span runs thin every day.  People don’t have the time nor the patience for long preludes.

I don’t like these long Flash introductions at all.  they’re time-consuming and pointless.  They tend to detract from the contents and, overall, they just add weight to the web site.  You can waste time, money and effort on making the best introduction ever, but it’s all the same in the long run:  a web designer showing off some skills.

Do you remember these Java scripts that would make a text follow your pointer or maybe change its shape?  It was pointless!  It didn’t look good at all, didn’t add content to the sites and it was a waste of time, just for the sake of showing someone’s abilities with a computer.

Aside of rendering me unable to overcome the shallowness of it all, the cutesy addendum serves no purpose.

One of the key elements to Internet marketing is to be accurate.  Sure, I’m probably no one to give advice considering that I tend to rant and ramble a lot on these blogs.  But… have you seen how easy and quick it is to buy anything online?  Have you noticed how you scroll down until you find the exact piece of information you need?  And least we get started about how tiresome it can be to read loads of text from a screen.

People praise substance over form all the time.  Having a nice website helps, but if it doesn’t walk the walk and talk the talk, it’s as useful as a screensaver with buttons.

We have discussed it before:  Flash is not the best alternative when it comes to design a site.  It is a great tool and it enhances interactivity, but it’s not the kind of basis you want to build an empire upon.  Of all the possible things you can do with it, having an introduction is one of the worst choices.

• It takes aeons to download.
• It takes aeons to get to the home page
• It is just nice animation.  Does it sell by itself?  Not really.
• It’s got no call to action nor links.

See where I’m going with this?  Web designs should be both attractive and functional.  If you want to make a promotional video, there’s people out there who can do it.  Chances are, you’re going to need to design a web site to promote it.  Are you going to stick a Flash intro to it?  Let me go for some popcorn while you give it some thought.