One feature used by some websites is the “walk-on spokesperson.” When you land on the home page, a video is activated. You see a person walk onto the screen in front of you and deliver a message. This person can be a professional model or even the dentist.
While this looks classy, we don’t believe it adds to conversions, and can have the effect of chasing people off the site. We had an example on the website of Dr. Wes Urich, a Minneapolis area dentist, but the walk-on spokesperson has since been taken off.
The use of moving images does enhance most websites, though there are a couple of important things to be said about the use of flash on websites.
The first is that we are now discouraging the use of flash programming for our clients and encouraging javascript for moving images. Flash continues to have some stability problems, and it doesn’t work on iPads and iPhones.
When it comes to the use of flash or other moving images, we can go as high-end as you want. We have designers who can produce very sophisticated designs, creating dazzling three-dimensional effects or other impressive displays. These elaborate flash effects are labor-intensive, so they are costly, and we recommend that you think it through carefully before spending money on these effects. We closely monitor conversion rates for our clients, and find that sites that are relatively plain often perform just as well as sites that are fancy. Sometimes, going overboard seems to make visitors feel that they are being over-sold, and they become distrustful. But if the image of your practice is one of high-end glitz, you may want to consider putting money into these elaborate effects.
