Hi all,
The site at the centre of your topic is my wife's and mine. We run have run Dance In Education Services for the past 12 years (me helping out in my spare time).
The e-commerce site is aimed at School teachers and our e-resources are exclusively created for Teachers and pupils in the compulsory education sector in the United Kingdom and, thus, are tied to the subject of Dance Teaching and Learning in the UK National Curriculum 2000. This is why there is a very wide range of products all created with our own hands over many years and in response to the changing curriculum.
The site has been up for a couple of months and there is a mammoth amount of work to do...be assured.
I certainly do not think there is too much on our site...we currently host only a small fraction of our product range in our e-shop...there's a lot more for people to download, but time, as you all know, is a common enemy in website design/promotion/management! If too many items on the shopping site page are a turn-off, then keep away from Amazon and e-Bay...hardly a model of successful online trading, anyway!! You search on these sites for more relevant stuff and we offer this facility, too.
Also, how does our sitepal welcomer differ from the emoticons you get on this very forum?...if you have used one it is because you wanted to smile, groan, curse or cry and have someone realise that emotion in an alternative way. Was the manner in which you displayed your feelings superfluous? Did your reader regard your emotion as less valid or real? Your emoticons are my sitepals.
The sitepal in question talks when you first visit (for 10 seconds or so) and shuts up until you click the play button again...or until your next session. You can switch its volume down, too.
The vast majority of 'download this resource for use in schools' websites tend to be flat and functional, I make no apologies for wanting to present Dance resources in a dynamic and kinaesthetic manner. Despite what Mr Nielsen and other 'usability' experts might say, in our sector, that little bit of 'glitter' - the talking woman, is a consistent talking point among our customers when they pick up the phone, or compose an email/ letter to order.
The In, Buy, Out model is a great one...but every single one of you have visited an online shop to browse..you probably do this more than actually buying! Our customers can, indeed, browse, they can listen to excerpts of our music tracks in the shop itself before buying, they can comment on the resource for others to read, they can do many things, but they can also come in, buy and get out with the minimum fuss. Obviously, as we sell music, we have music which is 'click-to-play'able on our site. One would not consider the sample preview facility on iTunes a nuisance...indeed, how many of you get in, buy and get out of iTunes? Do you, perhaps, stay a while to listen...of course you do, which is why people who record songs in their bedrooms can get into the charts...your reluctance to get in and out quickly breeds creativity and promotes every philosophical stance upon which the Internet was built.
I don't think that brevity is what customers always want...sometimes they want you to hold their hand, enlighten them, encourage them and make them feel special. These are people visiting our shop, not robots. They are the same people that we interface with regularly in our on-site workshops and staff training events (another arm of the business) and our consultancy work...real feedback from real and actual customers, not generalisations, not anonymous feedback forms - just comments from people who trusted us enough to strike up a commercial relationship.
If you walked into your local store and the shopkeeper told you that you could only get in, buy and get out, you'd be pretty disloyal next time you were wondering if a Snicker, Mars Bar or M&Ms were going to be the best thing for your latest choco-craving!
We have a main website and a UK national award-winning portal site (subscription only) for teachers and pupils of Dance. They also make use of sitepals...the portal is used by thousands of schools and tens of thousands of users across England and Wales (the reach of the National Curriculum) and one person has yet to let us know that these characters do not add to their experience...indeed they create a level of expectation. Pupils relate to these sitepals very well because they usually access their portal site from home or in their school library, where bthe real educator/tutor, is not there to guide.
I agree wholeheartedly about the 'fake' voice problem, but that's more to do with our old friend Father Time than money or a willingness to improve the user experience.
It was Tim Berners-Lee himself that said..."web pages are designed for people"...and I would concur by saying that our web pages are designed for our people...not necessarily 'the' people. I believe that we honour our corner of the Internet the way the other 10 billion web pages represent their own corner in this multi-faceted, cyberspacial anomaly. Our site is part of the diversity of the web and if we do things differently, or are perceived as 'unmodern', I would like to appeal to your sense of righteousness by saying that this does not mean that we are backward, inaccessible, unhip, or failing our valued customers. The fact that they continue to come back to our corner is testament to the validity and sheer worth of all our sleepless nights/years of resource and web developments.
Thanks for this discussion thread...I certainly do not feel that the general negativity around my site design choices was a bad thing...talk is better than guns!
All the very best to you all.