Ok famous line from a famous Movie, Top Gun. Wow, adrenalin packed 90 minutes, F18’s zooming across the sky, dog fights, it was awesome and that one line from Tom Cruise, “I feel the need, the need for speed” has become the catch cry before you put the pedal to the metal and zoom off down the highway or if you’re lucky strap yourself into your F18 and go and catch the clouds. I don’t think many of us would have an F18 sitting in our garage huh.
These days though, I feel the need for speed is no longer just screamed out by the petrol heads and sky pilots, that one line has become part and parcel of every web site build design sheet presented to a builder.
Yep, thanks to good old Google making us all 100% paranoid our potential customers will leave us quicker than you can say “Chester’s Dead” (another famous line in Top Gun) if our websites don’t load in under a few seconds. “The Need for Speed” is high on a customers want list.
The point is though that the majority of customers want this speed, but they also want the site to be sexy, awesome, state of the art, graphically enhanced, a few special effects here and there, like hey I need to stand out from the crowd type site. (This is on top of the often asked for minor request of being page one in Google)
So, at this point let me clarify a major issue, for something to go fast? We must consider a very important issue and that is weight. Formula One cars, MotoGP bikes, F18’s, horses even humans can go fast as long as long as they don’t weigh a lot, and if you want to go faster in any of these? Well, you have to start throwing out some ballast.
Heavyweights don’t win the 100 meters at the Olympics, folks.
So, let’s look at that website. Do you really need those 5000 pictures? What about that 190 pages of technical text? Those three videos you wanted to play on the slider? Do you think you can do without them?
When your customer is requesting speed but they still want all the goodies, maybe you should start singing “Highway to the danger zone” and remind them that’s it’s hard for a pig to fly and we might need to let go of some of the goodies, streamline the site a little, stick to facts and click to call, use more PDF’s and zippyty doo dah that site will fly.
Then you can ride off into the sunset on the back of a motorcycle and let the credits roll.
Enjoy the day and remember there’s NO SECOND CHANCE ON A FIRST IMPRESSION
