I’m not that old … well not really … but I still remember (and it wasn’t so long ago), that commerce was confined to local shops and businesses. OK there was the odd entrepreneur who had set up a chain of outlets across the country, and even fewer who had gone the whole way and set up international companies, we all know them, they were and some still are household names. They had the ability to think globally, and they profited immensely from that ability.
With the advent of the internet the percentage of entrepreneurs that have that ability has indeed grown, however, there are still a large number of web masters, commerce sites, companies and entrepreneurs who just ‘DON’T GET IT’, that when they publish material on the internet it’s like … “HELLO WORLD!”.
Being a resident of a smaller country I get frustrated with sites that offer all kinds of exciting services and then require site visitors to navigate several pages to get to the goodies (often in a cumbersome way), when you almost get there and you can almost taste the goodies, you have to fill in a form, that’s no problem at all, I don’t mind that, I recognise the fact that sites have to collect data ( I do so myself), and of course they have to have enough personal information so they know where to send stuff etc. So I start filling in the form … and you can bet that one of the last entries is either a phone number or an area (zip) code. You guessed it, the form will only accept a certain number of digits, and no way will it let you past that point unless you have the required number of digits. You’ve just spent 10 minutes getting here and filling out the form, only to find that the web master hasn’t understood that someone outside their immediate locality or country might be interested in their product, or just plain hasn’t done the research required, or even understood that different countries etc. have area codes and phone numbers of different lengths.
Similarly, you access a site in much the same manner only to find at the end of your toils that the form will only accept applications from a certain country. There is much spoken on the web about the 10 – 15 second wait for a page to download, .. I don’t mind waiting 10 seconds so long as I get some proper information like “sorry this offer is only valid in Timbuktu” then I wouldn’t have to waste 10 minutes before I found out.
In both of these examples I find it quite incongruous that a company has taken the step to publish on the internet, yet doesn’t understand fully that the very essence of the Internet is its global nature. Maybe it’s because I come from a small country that I think more readily in an international framework, but one of the first things that I think of (short of multiple languages) when I design web content, is to think of how accessible the content is globally or if indeed it is for a global market, if it’s not I say so up front, and I point them somewhere else that maybe of help. I don’t want my visitors to be dissatisfied with their sojourn to my site, I also want them to return. I won’t return to any of the sites that have glitches like the ones I have outlined above in a great hurry. I also can’t imagine how much trade they must be missing out on from international visitors!
Owen Lamb – Lecturer, Computer Aided Design and Architectural
Technologies. Special interests; Internet and Web Site Design.
His
site is jam packed with TOTALLY FREE Advice, Tutorials, Tools
and Articles on Web Site Design and Deployment:
http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org email: bytes@ihug.co.nz