Seriously.

I still work at a Walgreens (debating hanging myself with bungee cord) and I once had someone return a USED toilet plunger.

…I shit you not.

The woman brought it in a bag, smushed onto my counter, and stared at me directly.

Her words? “I need a manager.”

My words? “Yes, yes you do.”

I agree it’s really annoying. A lot of smaller WAHMs use this format because it’s significantly cheaper on a monthly basis than having their own separate hosting and shopping cart. They’re easy to manage for the non-tech micro-business owner.

Mind you, in a lot of cases they’re unintentionally damaging their business. Because a lot of page ranking is taken from content on the landing/index page they’re not being found by search engines because a) flash doesn’t get searched or b) they just have “click here to enter” on the landing page and nothing about their products or services.

Yeah, it bugs me….

flashy intro? idk…maybe it’s a geek way of compensating for something. kinda like a sports car.

Its a shame that we have all become jaded to the idea of splash pages and intros, because they can be a wonderful showcase of talent (I say can be, it could also look like a yeti wiped its arse with the screen), but then again, if I’m not reading something interesting or useful on a site within 1 10th of a second of landing on the first page I leave.

I think that you have to love but also feel sorry for these people; feel sorry for them because they obviously haven’t got the common sense to survive in the world around them, and love them because they seem to have more money than sense in order to fund the craziness and it shouldn’t take too much convincing to get them to bankroll a small island in the caribbean for you.

And if you get me a phone number for whoever returned Online Business School I know at least a dozen people who can verbally abuse them if they don’t think that they aren’t getting value for money in the swearing department.

Can’t tell you the number of clients that want a “splash” or “intro” or whatever random euphemism they heard in some hack’s seminar. And I generally say, “do you like to irritate your customers?”

(Like how I used the euphemism “irritate”? That’s me being professional. ;)

Worse than that is this: a friend had a website done for his business.

It’s AWFUL!

I won’t make make this a link cuz it’s really, really bad and I don’t want anyone clicking it accidentally: Add www and dotcom to m3ipinc if your curiosity gets the best of you. Otherwise accept that it’s all flash, all music, all the time..

OK, so I told him. In as nice a way as possible: that junk is going to cost him far more business than it ever gets him. I said

“Honestly – I do not like it.. music, flash, very glitzy – kind of site I
close instantly. Sorry.. I wouldn’t want to blow smoke up
your ass, you know that.”

That was a year and a half ago and if you do reconstruct the link, you’ll see it’s still awful.

So what do you do? The guy is really good at what he does but this has to turn people off..

What do you do when someone just doesn’t know how bad this is?