Musicians' Websites
Is your website helping you or is it actually doing you harm?
5. How To Piss Off Your Audience
Here's a real-life example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I recently visited the website of a well-known band. The navigation links for moving around the site were cute little graphics down the left side of the page.
They look very nice. But you know what a blind person or someone using a text-only browser gets? A list of links which all say -
Image
Image
Image
Image
Now, if that person is trying to find out where that band is playing next month, you tell me how the hell they're supposed to know which of those links saying "Image" is going to take them to the gigslist?
Does that band really expect someone to sit there clicking on every link in turn and then hitting their Back button until they find the right one? Dream on.
That site is telling them that that band don't want blind people or people using text-only browsers to come to their gigs. Remember what I said in the introduction to this section?
The text alternative to each of those graphics links gives exactly the same zero-level of information. I wonder which bit of the words "text alternative" the person who built it was having difficulty comprehending? Yet no doubt that person cheerfully styles themselves "a web designer".
"Web Design" has become the contemporary equivalent of selling used cars or double-glazing. Anyone who feels like it can call themselves "a web deezyner" and there are too many cowboys charging money for building websites which look great to someone with perfect vision using Internet Explorer on a Windows PC with Javascript and Flash enabled and a 1280px browser window.
The problem is, a lot of people aren't using anything remotely like that setup and too often all they get is an unusable, unreadable, unnavigable mess. If that was your website and the visitor wanted to find out where to buy your CD, then congratulations, you've just lost a sale and thoroughly pissed off a member of your audience.
It should be an elementary part of the construction of any commercial website that the person building it should, at each stage of development, switch off all image-loading, styling and scripting to see if the information is still clearly readable as plain text on a plain background and if all the navigation links are still usable and clearly identified. If not, the site's a lemon and urgently needs rebuilding.
The person who builds a website where the information can only be accessed by someone using the same setup as they are is not building a site for the World Wide Web, they are building a site for their own setup.
They're like a musician who insists on playing everything in the key of Db Major. They might get on fine solo but they're not much use to other musicians. When they then tell other musicians that it's all their own fault because they should be playing in Db Major too, it will begin to sound very much like unprofessionalism, incompetence and arrogance.
And if people visit your website and find that kind of arrogant refusal to let them use it until they alter their setup, they're not going to blame the person who built it - they're going to blame YOU!