Great Opening Lines

There are some great opening lines in literature:

“Call me Ishmael” - Moby Dick
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – 1994
”It was a pleasure to burn.” - Fahrenheit 451
”My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. “ – Great Expectations*
”A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” – Brace New World

 

Setting out from the start to make a good impression is important in anything whether it’s meeting people or making a proposal.  What does your opening line on your website say about your company?

For too many small companies, the feeling is the first impression needs to be loud, brash and animated.  The only problem is that the first line people tend to see is

“Loading…”

or

“Please Wait…”

It’s the Internet equivalent of being put on hold.  If you’re Porsche or Ferrari or Microsoft or Apple then people are coming to your website to visit you not a company like you so people will stay on the site and wait to watch the animation (incidentally, none of these companies use Flash on their homepage – neither does Adobe, and they market Flash).  If you’re one of many companies doing what you do, people will come to your website, will decide not to wait on hold for you to tell them about yourself and will go back to Google to find the next alternative.

Animations have their place when they are explaining things or showing an example but to base your Internet home page on something people don’t want to wait and see is a pointless exercise.  By the way, Google doesn’t recognise the text in Flash so it won’t help your search engine rankings either.

Sure, have a small advert that draws the eye but don’t make your visitors wait, they won’t.

 

* Ok, not the greatest opening line but as it’s my favourite book, I felt I ought to include it.