Work In progress - critique please?

"Geoff Ball" <geoff.ball (AT) shaw (DOT) ca> wrote

DaKitty wrote:

[Numerous explanations about why the mailto protocol sucks ass.]

What is your market research experience as it relates to Civil
Engineers,
Environmental Engineers, Architects and Land Developers?

I don't do market research.

Are they more likely to go for the personal touch, or are they more
inclined to fill out forms

"Error: There is currently no program configured to handle this request."

Yeah. That's the personal touch, all right.

Are they more likely to fill out a form, email you, fax you or phone
you?

When selling something for $30K, would you want even 1% of your users to
be
unable to contact you?

User does not equal a buyer.
You're talking fine points of clean html coding vs. marketing.

If you're buying a house, are you more likely to fill out a form, or get
the address of the real-estate agent, and talk to him directly?

It's not like the form or email is going to be the last step in buying the
house. You'd be seeing him directly before you purchased it, I'm sure.

Exactly my point.

What does the high dollar item buying psychology tell you about the
habits
of those making significant purchases?

Where is this going, and what does it have to do with the crappiness of
mailto?

I'm just trying to determine how relevant your opinion of the crappiness of

the "mailto" is to my potential clientele, and whether I want to depart from
what they are used to seeing, being that most of them are already very
uncomfortable in front of the computer and fickle to anything that is
different. Email they are getting used to, and even copying down the email
by hand and typing it back in their emailing program, whichever one they
use. Forms and form submission reminds them of "my computer can get hacked
into this way" because they tens to confuse it with e-commerce, creditcard
number theft, spam flooding and other net things that they understand very
little about, and that scare them. "Oh no, a form, I'm going to end up on a
major mailing list, and I'm not going to bother reading the fine print." I'm
going to get a virus, because I never filled out a form before.

You're not considering a marketing point that is extremely important to me
in this business, and that's the average mentality and surfing style of my
potential customer. I may gain 100% mailability, and lose 25% of the Land
developers because they barely know how to turn on the computer and send off
an email, and even the slightest departure from the usual causes them to
back off. Yes, those people do exist.
In this case, this is one of my most lucrative client, because they have the
biggest need for my end product.

So, I may lose a Mac user, or a Linux user, a computer enthusiast that
doesn't care about the mainstream but is using what he thinks is a finer
product in spite of it not being the mainstream, who is looking at the
pictures, and can't email me on the fly because they don't use the
mainstream software setup.

You're not addressing the profile of the potential user that I may be losing
by having a mailto vs. a form, and the likelihood of that particular profile
user turning into a customer.

It baffles me that you are not addressing much of what I'm saying and
asking, and strongly pushing against the use of mailto, which, having spent
last couple of hours checking out the websites of my competition and
potential clients, every single one is using mailto, and only 3 or 4 out of
30-50 that I looked at are using forms.

I heard your opinion of mailto the first 2 responses, looks like the rest of
it is you trying to change my mind that it's crappy and that I shouldn't use
it, regardless of my concerns, and mainly focusing on your dislike of it.
Your resisting to even discuss some of my concerns just confirms that it is
the purist issue, where you're more concerned with the latest and the
greatest slick code, but not considering all the aspects of what people are
used to, the psychology of the end user.

You know, kind of the same reason why Linux, a product superior to windows
isn't hitting the mainstream. People who are just starting to get the hang
of windows and are having a hard time understanding half of it aren't ready
to be hit with all kinds of new and improved stuff.
That's precisely why I asked you about your experience with the surfing
habits of people who are my target audience.

The bottom line is, you have no clue what their concerns and surfing habits
are, you're just trying to convince me that a form is better than a mailto.
In a perfect worlds, I agree with you. Considering my target audience, I
don't agree with you. Is that so difficult to grasp, or is your philosophy
that all websites should be created equal, in spite of the target audience?

DaKitty wrote:

http://www.cb-design.net

I'm still little more partial to the dark background with light colored
text.

Can somebody explain to me how dark backgrounds became so popular? I
find it inherently more difficult to read light text on dark background.
Seems that the chosen colors never contrast enough, so I gotta make the
text size huge to read it. Is this supposed to be "art" or something?

BTW, did you know that your .jsp pages are coming out as text/plain, so
the page is showing source code instead of rendered HTML? You need to
fix the MIME type on the server.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)ns(dash). Mail sent to the ns
address is automatically deleted and will not be read.

kchayka <kcha-ns-yka (AT) sihope (DOT) com> wrote:

Can somebody explain to me how dark backgrounds became so popular?

Certainly. Black matches everything, and a dark background tends to mask
mistakes. A white background is much less forgiving.

IMO.

I prefer light backgrounds because they are open, inviting and visually
spacious.

--
Farlo
Urban Fey Dragon
"Imperial" States of America
(The Land of Confusion)

DaKitty wrote:

[Use of mailto:]

You're not considering a marketing point

I heard your opinion of mailto the first 2 responses, looks like the rest
of it is you trying to change my mind that it's crappy and that I
shouldn't use it, regardless of my concerns

Your resisting to even discuss some of my concerns just
confirms that it is the purist issue, where you're more concerned with the
latest and the greatest slick code, but not considering all the aspects of
what people are used to, the psychology of the end user.

The bottom line is, you have no clue what their concerns and surfing
habits are, you're just trying to convince me that a form is better than a
mailto.

That's because this is a technical web design group, not a marketing one.

Regards,
Geoff

--
http://68.145.145.156:8080/
http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Geoff_Ball
http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Web_Core_References
http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?How_to_post

"Geoff Ball" <geoff.ball (AT) shaw (DOT) ca> wrote

DaKitty wrote:

[Use of mailto:]

You're not considering a marketing point

I heard your opinion of mailto the first 2 responses, looks like the
rest
of it is you trying to change my mind that it's crappy and that I
shouldn't use it, regardless of my concerns

Your resisting to even discuss some of my concerns just
confirms that it is the purist issue, where you're more concerned with
the
latest and the greatest slick code, but not considering all the aspects
of
what people are used to, the psychology of the end user.

The bottom line is, you have no clue what their concerns and surfing
habits are, you're just trying to convince me that a form is better than
a
mailto.

That's because this is a technical web design group, not a marketing one.

I understand.
That's why I was trying to asses whether it makes sense for me to worry
about that particular technical detail, when I'm considering the big
picture.

But thanks for the mind jogging discussion

"Altamir" <altamir (AT) wp (DOT) pl> wrote

[Numerous explanations about why the mailto protocol sucks ass.]
[Numerous explanations about why the mailto protocol doesn't sucks ass.]

Do we have to choose between "mailto" and a form? Why not use both?

Altamir

On many sites we could.
I'm still worried that just the presence of the form
(especially near the start of the site) will put off some of my potential
customers.
couple of the competitors, as I noticed, have dedicated a whole page to
"contact us" where they have their brick and mortar address, a mailto and a
form with not just email fields but an interest questionnaire too.
I may end up doing something like that myself in the next refinement pass of
the website,

I do like to have a 'mailto' on every page, that way surfers whose attention
span is usually 3 seconds don't have to flip between the pages to email,
especially if I have a few graphics on the page, I don't want them to have
to flip top the next page until they're ready to look at the next picture.

Did you know that most market research tells us that we have 3 seconds to
capture someone's attention online.

"kchayka" <kcha-ns-yka (AT) sihope (DOT) com> wrote

DaKitty wrote:

http://www.cb-design.net

I'm still little more partial to the dark background with light colored
text.

Can somebody explain to me how dark backgrounds became so popular? I
find it inherently more difficult to read light text on dark background.
Seems that the chosen colors never contrast enough, so I gotta make the
text size huge to read it. Is this supposed to be "art" or something?

Actually, for those of us who used computers back in 1980's, black
background with white, green or amber thext is the norm.
For me, dark background is still easier to look at for a long time, provided
there is enough contrast between the text and the background.
Whan you work on the computer, year after year, dark background causes a lot
less eye strain.
Black background/green text being the most pleasant, long term.
Kind of the same reason the theathers are dark when you go in and watch a
movie...

For people who have not been working on computers for years and years, and
are more used to reading things on paper, dark background is very odd. True,
on paper, dark letters on light paper is easier to read.
I've had a number of people request light bckground with dark text on their
website, only to decide to switch to dark back, light type after about a
year of staring at their own website. Out of 6 accounts, 5 have done that
without my prompting. Where at the begining I showed them several shemes,
recomended the dark back/light text, they chose the oppoite, only to want to
switch about a year later, all on their own. Thats an interesting occurence
to me.

BTW, did you know that your .jsp pages are coming out as text/plain, so
the page is showing source code instead of rendered HTML? You need to
fix the MIME type on the server.

I want to save those as HTML anyway rather than leaving them as jsp.
Which browser/configuration are you using when you see the pages as source
code only?
OUt of about 15 different people (here, and friends) you're the only one
telling me that jsp pages aren't working.
I'm still new to some of the details here, I'm not sure what you mean by
fixing the MIME type oin the server.
I'd appreciate it if you took a minute and axplain that , or maybe there's
a link that explains it?

DaKitty wrote:

"kchayka" <kcha-ns-yka (AT) sihope (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:3f0c3938$1 (AT) news (DOT) sihope.com...
DaKitty wrote:

http://www.cb-design.net

BTW, did you know that your .jsp pages are coming out as text/plain,
so the page is showing source code instead of rendered HTML? You
need to fix the MIME type on the server.

Which browser/configuration are you using when you see the pages as
source code only?

Any decent browser (anything other than IE ;-) ).

OUt of about 15 different people (here, and friends) you're the only
one telling me that jsp pages aren't working.

They are all using IE.

I'm still new to some of the details here, I'm not sure what you mean
by fixing the MIME type oin the server.

The server is configured to send a certain MIME type for different types of
files. This tells the browser what sort of content the file contains. In
this case, it is telling the browser that it is "text/plain", so the browser
renders it as plain text. Except IE, which thinks it knows better, so
checks the filename extension (.jsp) and renders it how it thinks it should
be rendered. In this case, it is what you want it to do, but IE is actually
in violation of the specifications. You (or your host) need to configure
the server to send the correct MIME type for .jsp pages ("text/html"?).

HTH

--

Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

"Mark Parnell" <webmaster (AT) clarkecomputers (DOT) com.au> wrote

DaKitty wrote:
"kchayka" <kcha-ns-yka (AT) sihope (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:3f0c3938$1 (AT) news (DOT) sihope.com...
DaKitty wrote:

http://www.cb-design.net

BTW, did you know that your .jsp pages are coming out as text/plain,
so the page is showing source code instead of rendered HTML? You
need to fix the MIME type on the server.

Which browser/configuration are you using when you see the pages as
source code only?

Any decent browser (anything other than IE ;-) ).

hehe, I can see the love

OUt of about 15 different people (here, and friends) you're the only
one telling me that jsp pages aren't working.

They are all using IE.

That's probably a very fair assesment.

I'm still new to some of the details here, I'm not sure what you mean
by fixing the MIME type oin the server.

The server is configured to send a certain MIME type for different types
of
files. This tells the browser what sort of content the file contains. In
this case, it is telling the browser that it is "text/plain", so the
browser
renders it as plain text. Except IE, which thinks it knows better, so
checks the filename extension (.jsp) and renders it how it thinks it
should
be rendered. In this case, it is what you want it to do, but IE is
actually
in violation of the specifications. You (or your host) need to configure
the server to send the correct MIME type for .jsp pages ("text/html"?).

Ah, thanks for that info
I'll change the files to html anyway. The program I was using saved them as
jsp, and when I saw they are showing up in IE, I really didn't pay much
attention to why they got saved as JSP. Now I know. I'll save them as html,
like I wanted them to be in the first place.
That will fix the problem, right?
I really had no specific desire to have the pages in jsp format.

DaKitty wrote:

I'll change the files to html anyway. The program I was using saved
them as jsp, and when I saw they are showing up in IE, I really
didn't pay much attention to why they got saved as JSP. Now I know.
I'll save them as html, like I wanted them to be in the first place.
That will fix the problem, right?

I can't see anything in those pages that requires them to be .jsp, so yes,
that should fix it.

--

Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au