I need to vent for a minute. Twice in the last week I have visited “media company” web sites that had serious errors. They might seem small or insignificant to some people, but they can make a huge (negative) impact on your business if you are making these errors yourself, or worse, trusting the experts to tell you to do it in the first place.

FIRST

Make sure you have optimized your images with the proper dimensions and resolution. This is like “Web Site Design 101” stuff here from 1995, and it’s mind-blowing that web site developers are still making these mistakes. Basically, the error exists when you insert a giant image (like anything more than a half-magabyte) into your site and simply scale down the DISPLAY size of that image. It’s like cramming a whole gallon of milk into a kid’s sippy cup. The negative effect is that your web site visitor is having to wait FOREVER for this gigantic, high-resolution image to load, and it’s really only supposed to be a couple of inches wide at 72 dpi. So the fix is that you use a photo-editing program (i.e. Photoshop) to set the appropriate image size and resolution, save the file as your web version, and insert that web version into your web page. It will then load quickly for your visitor. We recently visited a media agency’s website that was littered with mega-sized clip art files that were at least 5 MB each!

SECOND

Please everyone, stop making web sites in Flash. Nobody wants to waste fifteen seconds watching your cute “loading” graphic get bigger. Plus, your site doesn’t work on my iPhone or my iPad. And where it does show up on mobile, it’s slooooow. Making web sites in flash is literally “so 2000.” Please, stop it already. Sadly, the all-flash site I most recently noticed was a San Diego area marketing company “offering solutions.” If those are the solutions you offer, I think most people should pass on the offer.