Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Shop hop clueless rant

I've been doing these online yarn and fabric shop hops. You go to a site and find a graphic that you click and you get credit for finding it. Most of the time, the shop will give you some sort of clue as to where the graphic might be found. The other times, you have to deal with the clueless. I mean that in both senses of the word. I can understand that a business would like people to look at many parts of their site. Not supplying a clue will definitely make people look at a lot of different pages. However, this can backfire big time. If someone clicks on every possible link on a site with menus from hell, that person will remember your site. That person will also never EVER wish to return for any reason. I'm unlikely to finish the current yarn dash because of two sites with no clues (and I suspect no "found it" graphics).

Clueless ones, there are options. One site I visited today made a little game of getting people to look through their site. The owner's picture was put on a series of pages that she wanted people to see. You looked at the page, found the picture, clicked on the picture, and were moved to another page. At the end of about a half dozen pages was the "found it" graphic. The owner got what she wanted and so did I. That's the exact opposite of what happened with your sites.

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