I have spent a lot of time recently researching Sydney-based agencies to invite to the upcoming Launch of our Vquence VQmetrics service. This involved finding their websites, finding out about their target business (do they do online video?), finding a relevant contact, and emailing an invitation to them.
I am close to institutional confinement!
I do understand that agencies need to show off their creativity on their Website. The result of this is that most agency Websites are completely written in Flash. Fortunately I have the latest version of Flash installed, so I can load them all. But my Web browser and MacBook do not deal well with having more than about 5 tabs open with Flash content – my machine almost grunts to a halt. So, there goes the idea of opening multiple tabs at the same time while waiting for the lengthy Flashs of the sites to load…
Then, once the pages are loaded, it is always a surprise to see what the agency has come up with. At the beginning of the exercise it was a surprise. Later it became a nuisance. Now, I am utterly terrified before opening another agency Website. Will it break my browser? Will it start playing a video? Will it start playing music so loud that it blasts off my ears? Will I feel really stupid because I cannot navigate the site? Will I be able to locate the “Contact Us” section? Will they have bothered to publish an email address or do I have to fill in a stupid contact form that I know nobody will look at? Will the contact email work or just bounce?
It almost feels like the creation of the Website is a competition between the agencies as to who can create the maddest, most unusual, and most unusable Website.
Please, please! Can I just have a simple, usable site with obvious navigation, a simple and fast loading list of reference work, and a list of key people working at the agency with their email contacts?
Oh, and Mumbrella has just published a post that gives me scientific proof that this is a conspiracy against me by the agencies! No, stop that – I am not ready to be locked up yet!
> Please, please! Can I just have a simple, usable site with obvious navigation, a simple and fast loading list of reference work, and a list of key people working at the agency with their email contacts?
Sacrilege!
ROFL, just discovering the same phenomenon, its all very innovative and clever for a HSC art work but a pain in the ass to actually use for more the say…. 15 sec (after the 20 sec load time).
That said if you dont do some flash wank i know the drones in marketing will judge you to not be “a cutting edge digital agency” like the next agency that does.
Personally i like to look at the code to see what their JS is like, what frameworks they use and see if i can guess what open source CMS the will try and sell us (or better yet what proprietary blobs they will want to lock us into).
eatem – I agree, they probably all have to do this. It still doesn’t make me like the idea. 🙂