Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

yourmove - the rightmove?

For reasons I won't go into I was looking at property on the YOUR MOVE website [your-move.co.uk]. There is a search facility that allows you to target your search - and yet the spacing of the house prices seems a bit off.
I would assume professional house sellers know what they are doing [and remember, I am a trained salesperson and I've been in marketing for some time] but why the jump from £100,000 to £150,000? Can't be a space issue, because up to £60,000 the steps are in 10s - and who buys houses for less than £60,000? And yet - and I could be wrong - surely there are lots of houses for sale for between £100,000 to £150,000? I would have thought the better sales tactic would have been increments of 10 so that a buyer might be tempted into searching for [say] up to £110,000 - when they really have a limit of £100,000.

Competitors Rightmove seem to agree with me, not only going from
£100,000 to £150,000 in 10,000 increments, but even including £125,000 in the middle.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

sweet FA on this splash page

I went to the Football Association [FA] website to checkup on my Saturday morning footie team's fixtures - but I was not on my computer and couldn't use my bookmark, so I went to the home page and clicked on the link for 'Durham'. This opened a new window and this page came up.
Now ... as you would expect I'm quite experienced as a web surfier, but I couldn't see a link to get me off this page [the content of which was of no interest to me]. Notice how this advert fills the screen - and I was using a reasonable sized screen, not a laptop or mobile device. As I do know something about website development, I looked at the location bar, and saw this:
Let's not go down the road of questioning this poor se of file names [the search engines would ignore this one, for example], buts as I know what a 'splash' page is I knew there must be a way off of it - and when I looked down in the right hand corner [see red arrow in ithe first image above], sure enough there was a tiny bit of page that had not appeared 'above the fold' and when I scrolled down, got this:
I wonder how many folk made the same mistake as me? I wonder if everyone found their way past this page? Think I was stupid not seeing it? maybe, but web developers MUST design for stupid people - for they are customers too.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

a communications survey that doesn't communicate

This email arrived today.
As I though the results might be interesting, I clicked on the 'take the survey' link - and I got this page:
Yep, in the few minutes between receiving the email and visiting the site the survey had ended. Hmmmmm ... something amiss me thinks?

UPDATE: this email arrived this afternoon

Not sure blaming it on a prankster works, more likely a mistake on their part - but hey ... at least they resolved the error quickly.