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View Full Version : sites from the surfer vs webmaster perspective



basschick
04-03-2008, 04:21 PM
for over a decade, i've watched webmasters as they build sites for themselves. and liking your own site isn't a bad thing, of course! but my experience has shown that what surfers like about sites and what webmasters like about sites are two different things.

take eye candy tours. i've never sold an eye candy tour as well as a tour that shows what the site has to offer clearly. from a webmaster perspective, i love a beautifully designed, beautiful executed site with great colors, everything fitting together. but the ones that sell best let guys see the models and some specifics. and often the best selling sites have plain or so-so designs, but they have the right models for their niche and they make sure it's easy to browse them. still, webmasters oooh and ahhh when a new eye candy tour is presented - i know i do. something beautiful deserves recognition.

or take the simple desire that webmasters have to protect their content and their bandwidth. sure, you don't want surfers downloading your exclusive content.

in a perfect webmaster world, videos wouldn't be downloadable, surfers wouldn't demand high quality (read more transfer) videos and DRM would be perfectly acceptable to surfers. and no surfer would complain about a watermark on the videos.

the problem is that in a perfect surfer world, videos are really big and high quality, although never too large in file size. all videos are downloadable in both clips and full scenes and there are no watermarks or DRM.

note that these things are completely incompatible, so what we're looking at here is going to be a compromise at best. there's no way that both surfers and webmasters are going to get what they want here.

anyone got any more examples of where surfers and webmasters have different perspectives on websites? and i'm not talking about misleading stuff but an actual difference of opinion or perception.

Gaystoryman
04-03-2008, 04:24 PM
Navigation is I think one of them. Webmasters, due to their knowledge of the site they built, know where everything is, they aren't coming to it cold so their scheme of navigating can be misleading, confusing. To us it makes perfect sense, to the customer, they scratch their heads then leave.

my 2 cents

xstr8guy
04-03-2008, 04:50 PM
Navigation is I think one of them. Webmasters, due to their knowledge of the site they built, know where everything is, they aren't coming to it cold so their scheme of navigating can be misleading, confusing. To us it makes perfect sense, to the customer, they scratch their heads then leave.

my 2 cents


I agree. It's SOOOO easy to assume that surfers understand what a "menu" is. But I seriously wonder how many people actually see anything other than the first page of a non-linear tour. And we simply refuse to do a "next page' type of tour.