Saturday at 11:30 is time for “The Age of Persuasion” on CBC radio.

If you haven’t been following the series, hosted by Terry O’Reilly, you are missing an entertaining and informative series on adevertising and marketing. Fortunately, the series is now available on streaming audio.

This week the topic was “23 things I’d Like to Change About Advertising”. As usual the presentation was entertaining and informative. However, like a number of O’Reilly’s, presentation it can be boiled down to one phrase – respect your customers.

In “23 Things . . . “, O’Reilley covers many of the complaints we all have with adveristing. Everyone from telemarketers to loud business owners doing their own cheap commercial make his hit list. Absent, however, are the many ways that the Internet has come up with to disrespect the customer.

Forget spam – even spam websites. Real businesses, with real websites have found new and innovative ways to disrespect the customer.

Here is my top ten hit list:

1. “Under Construction” pages. If the page isn’t ready don’t link to it.
2. Broken links – why are you wasting my time with a broken link – remove it!
3. IE only sites. Yes – they do exist. What other business model turns away 20% of its potential clients.
4. Closely related are sites that are not cross browser compatible. They look good with one browser, usually IEx, but fail to display properly on others.
5. Splash pages – again, you are wasting my time.
6. Flash only pages. Pity the person on a dialup who has to wait while some moron features his graphics designer – not his product.
7. Pages that load the whole image instead of a thumbnail.
8. Broken Javascript. If your page relies on Javascript make sure it works.
9. Animated images the endlessly repeat. Show it once then STOP!
10. Tiny fonts. Yes I know how to change the font size – but not everyone does. Either use a bigger font, or let the user select a larger font size.

Tags: marketing, web design

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