Swedile in the Classroom #1

I find myself quite ambivalent towards corporate websites. In the rare instances I find myself visiting one, it’s always needlessly complicated and slow and it just doesn’t make me want to bother. Promotional movie websites are notorious for being very showy with very little content. The study performed by Deborah E. Rosen and Elizabeth Purinton seems to more or less make it evident that people prefer simple web designs to large, showy ones that only deter people from wanting to interact with the site.

While reading this study, I was immediately reminded of a post by rude, crude online personality Maddox. It was a post made about the same time (give or take a year) as when this study came out. In the article, Maddox demonstrates that, while major corporations pour millions into advertising and image, he gets more traffic than all of them without spending a dime on putting his name out there. As he puts it, “I've spent a grand total of $0.00 promoting my site. McDonald's corporation spent about $1.2 million on Internet promotions last year, so you'd think that of the "millions served daily," a few of them would log on every now and then and check their site just out of curiosity, if only to see nutritional (or lack of nutritional) information.” He even provides a graph, showing the amount spent on advertising and what have you (I think it’s safe to include money spent by companies on consultants who perform studies to determine their best possible image on and off the web) versus the Alexa traffic ranking from 08/15/2003 (Alexa.com), where a smaller number denotes a higher ranking (Yahoo being #1, MSN #2 and so on):

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=owned

This is rather telling, since not only is his website uncomplicated, Maddox basically uses regular HTML and homemade graphics he makes on MSPaint.

Not only does this example give credence to the study above, in that the simpler website received (in 2003 at least) far more traffic than any of the major fast food chains did, but it also points to the notion of content. What content does Pepsi give us? I went on their website (http://www.pepsi.ca/en/promo.htm), and after being accosted with a false homepage, a pop-up of the real page, busy graphics, and insufferably bland music, I can honestly say this; I have no idea what they have on their site. I saw something about playing some game, some contest stuff, and something about designing a can. I had little – well, actually, no – interest in going further. What the article said about a site having ten seconds to catch our attention really is true, it seems. Pepsi had its chance to grab my attention, but it threw a bunch of nonsense at me instead.

I do somewhat disagree with one aspect of the study, though, and that is on the subject of mystery. The study seems to suggest that people want websites to be concise and not mysterious, so that we do not have to spend a great deal of time searching and exploring. While that is certainly true of the Pepsi site, there have been a few examples of late that seem to suggest mystery is welcome in the right circumstances. First of all, this may just be me who feels this way, but when I’m on one of my geek news sites (Superherohype.com, TFW2005.com, Ain’t It Cool News, etc), and their headline that one clicks to read the full article says something like “And Captain America is being played by…” and you have to go on to the full article to find out who, I think that’s enticing. It’s sort of like opening a present; you have that momentary thrill of uncertainty and mystery.

However, an even bigger example is the sudden onset of Viral Sites. It takes the concept of the “Captain America will be played by…” hook and amps it to the max. This past year, with the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight fast approaching, Warner Bros. opened a various number of tiny little websites under the heading of “Why So Serious?” The sites looked like newspaper clippings with scratched out or replaced words, as if it were a personal message from the Joker himself.

These sites were basically cryptograms, and when someone cracked the code or the password or whatever, exclusive content would be unearthed, like a new trailer or a sneak peek of Harvey Dent as Two-Face; Something or other to reward the involved participant for their efforts. It was hugely popular, and Warner Bros intends to repeat the process with similar movies, one such example being the upcoming Watchmen. These sites are anything but concise, but they saw a huge amount of traffic and scored the movie huge buzz. It’s little wonder the movie did so well.

- Silent G