Why Insist On Annoying Customers?

In today's world, almost every photographer has a website, even my dog has decided to be Internet savvy and put up his own website. In a fully unscientific research, basically my own experience, I found that the vast majority of photographers use Flash.

I hate Flash, actually I retract, I strongly dislike Flash:

1. For security reasons, I have disabled Flash on my web browsers.
2. For convenience reasons, it's far to slow, I have disabled Flash on my web browsers.

Why do most "artsy" type of people use Flash on the Internet? In my opinion:

1. They think Flash is cool.
2. "Me too" syndrome. She has it, so I must have it.
3. "See how sexy" my website is.
4. They have been shown their website on a fast server over a local network, so there is no problem with the speed and bandwidth.

Every year, Photoshelter interviews photo buyers. The 2009 photo buyer survey is at: 2009 photo buyer survey. If you give them your email address, they will send you the detailed survey.

One of their questions was:

Flash based introduction to your website: % tolerate/like flash based introductions and % hate flash based introductions

What do I look for when going to a photographer's website? See the photos. I want to see them large and at my own speed.

1. The more you will annoy your customers, the less you will sell!
2. As much as we would hate to think, we photographers are a dime a dozen. The photo buyers will move to the next website, with approximately 27 million of them.

Quote from Andrew Fingerman, VP Marketing of PhotoShelter

Thanks so much Syv.

Per your flash question, the original pass at the survey questions was done by our founder Grover Sanschagrin, who has been a pro photographer for ages, and has worked on photographers' websites for longer than I've owned a computer. So, he has a pretty good sense of all the different design elements that photographers consider and debate including. Photographers need to understand their audience. Brides and art aficionados may tolerate flash slideshows vs. busy photo editors. So, PhotoShelter enables photographers to select static vs. flash display using our templates - and see a healthy mix of both selected.

We felt it was important to provide this guidance - quite frankly we were surprised by how deep the negative feelings run! On the page with the comment snippets - we provided but a tiny fraction of what we actually saw. It was a free form field and I swear, of more than 500 comments, so many were trashing uncontrollable flash slideshows, flash intros, or music.