Design | Bells & Whistles
[Previous] [Next] [Articles]Written by Paul Noia
As I've stated in the PPC article "To Pay or Not to Pay", there is a time and place for everything. Being a designer, I love the challenge of really cool Flash driven web sites. Being a musician, I love multimedia and music. However, when it comes to business and making money on a corporate level, it can be a detriment to the bottom line because it detracts/distracts your audience from ever realizing your message. Better yet, it can cause you to lose your audience altogether. The speed of business is very fast and it may cause someone to move on if they can't find what they are looking for as quickly as possible because you have a lot of cool stuff crammed into your site.
Graphics, especially motion graphics/text or animation should be used with a great deal of discretion. More specifically, it should only be used to visually communicate an idea that is going to add impact to the overall message. For example, placing an image of a car smashed into little tiny fragments after careening into a brick wall with text under it that says "Have another beer" sends a pretty powerful message that driving drunk is dangerous and stupid and bad things can happen if you do.
Bells & whistles should only be used to better articulate, or re-enforce a message. The reason I say this, is that on a cognitive level, we can process images more quickly than we can process text. For example, seeing a red octagon takes less time to process than only seeing the word stop, hence the stop sign.
So unless you are developing an entertainment site, being cool is not the most important thing… delivering a powerful message quickly and efficiently is priceless. For more great information you won't find on this site, subscribe to the edge today!
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