Post #67
I will now count backwards from ten
5th December 2003, the wee hours | Comments (15)
Getting your message across to the browsing-public is a tough job for web site owners: reading on-screen is far from optimal; connection speeds are still slow here in the UK; and with the average user’s attention span being smaller than my pen is (it's a very small pen), a web site owner has to work hard to retain a visitor beyond those first few seconds.
Layout and colour, typeface and copy, structure and style; all should combine to relay a subtle message of trust and familiarity to your visitors.
Unheralded stars of this deft art, the team behind Culture Front couldn’t have got it more right.
From its clean lines and delightful colour scheme (not too many people could combine pink, electric green and diarrhea-brown, but they carry it off with aplomb) to the evil-eye banner-ad drawing you in: the whole site wreaks of class.
Seeing this page for the first time I felt a warm glow within me; hello, I thought, here’s a site I can trust, and they clearly believe in what they’re selling: hypnosis.
I was only a matter of seconds before I’d clicked on all the links on the page, filling Firebird with, ha ha, dare I say it, hypnotic content!! Here’s some of it:
I successfully hypnotised my first subject using your script. He was hypnotised to a very deep trance and I was able to suggest he forgot his name and a number. Then I put him back into trance and removed the suggestion.
You see, hypnosis is fun. He was able to suggest he forgot his name and a number
— fabulous!
I have already hypnotised 2 people to a deep level of trance producing negative and positive hallucinations and doing most of the stage routines you suggest in your book with complete success. It is a great feeling to achieve this!!
That’s a beautiful story…
And so you see, you don’t need a Bowman, or a Shea, or a Zeldman to build a successful site. No. Save your money. All you need are some obscure colours, a buzz word you can repeat until the cows come home, and, of course, the magic ingredient: un-natural powers of hypnotic suggestion.
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Blogmarks
A collection of miscellaneous links that don't merit a main blog posting, but which are interesting none-the-less.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
— George W Bush (9)- What WordPress is doing to combat comment spam. (1)
- Mobile web tools, from Pukupi. (1)
- Pukupi’s top 10 hints for building interoperable mobile Web sites. (3)
- The photography of E.J. Peiker. (4)
Stuff from the intersection of design, culture and technology.
(3)- Some handy tips for advanced Google use. (35)
- Make your own church signs, or view some real ones. (8)
- Michael Heilemann is doing a great job with his new WordPress theme; Kubrick. (1)
- I’m late to the party, but Dan has a book out. (1)
- What a crazy concept for laying out housing estates. (3)
- In San Francisco, I live here. (Try the zoom feature.) (1)
- Spider-Man reviews crayons. [Via] (3)
- Some beautiful images from photographer Greg Downing. (2)
- Lots of links, from the Link Bunnies. (1)
- Nice “when I was a child” sort of post from Stuart. (1)
- How much does SafariSorter cost? (4)
- Some handy maintenance tips for Mac owners running Panther. (2)
- Alex King launches Use Tasks: a hosted service for Tasks and Tasks Pro™. (2)
- Min Jung, Anil Dash, and I get interviewed for HBO’s Real Sex. (10)
Blog-roll
A selection of blogs I read on a regular basis.
- Hmm, the blog-roll seems to be a little bit broken right now (it may be that the blo.gs service is having problems). I’ve sent myself an email about this problem, and will try to fix it ASAP.