Although many mortgage professionals have realized the detrimental effect music and flash intros on their mortgage websites can have on mortgage lead generation, there are still some who haven’t gotten the memo. What was the memo? The memo was that your mortgage website is not YouTube.com, not MTV.com, and flash intros and music on your website are a turnoff to visitors and will considerably diminish your lead generation capability. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get this memo or even if you really like the music on your website, just realize that this website altering affliction needs to stop, now. Unless your site is elfyourself.com, that is.
Flash intros (the short movie or video you are shown on a website that asks you if you would like to “Skip Intro” before going to website) are essentially an outdated relic of the web of yesteryear. Flash intros were more times than not the result of mortgage website designers caring more about creating a “neat” intro that was fun and challenging to build as opposed to taking into consideration the client’s needs and goals in regards to conversion.
Flash intros will hurt your lead generation on two fronts. The first is that your visitors HATE flash intros. It is true. Even if you happen to think your flash intro is “great”, your visitors do not. Have you ever actually even sat through a full flash intro, or do you click on “Skip Intro” like the rest of us? Actually, some of us simply navigate to another site at the first sign of a flash intro. Flash intros create one more hoop that visitors must go through before they can learn about you, your products, and your services.
The second strike against flash intros on mortgage websites is that they are not easily indexed, if at all, by most search engines. This means your home or index page of your website cannot (more times than not) be found by search engine users as it is not indexed and will not show up in search results. This is obviously bad and counter-productive to lead generation. When flash intro pages do happen to be indexed, they contain little to no content (think words) to index which means obtaining any meaningful ranking results is unlikely for that page. Remember, this is the home page or root of your domain and is the most important page on your website!
For the same reasons listed above, music and or sounds are an absolute no on your mortgage website. This applies to click navigation or other navigation related sound effects as well. If you must have an instructional video or other video or sound based element in your website, it is imperative that you default these to not play when somebody visits your website. If a visitor wants to listen to your video or sound based content, they can still do so without forcing the rest of your visitors to immediately stop the video or sound element. Your visitors don’t want to have to rush to their volume button if they are visiting your website during a conference call, when they are on the phone, or when they are in a meeting and your musical website springs into action.
The moral of the story, don’t undermine your online credibility and online lead generation by employing outdated and ineffective methods such as flash intros or music on your mortgage website! If you come across a mortgage website designer or mortgage website design company offering such designs, run the other way, they will also likely be engaging in other mortgage website design and mortgage marketing activities that are counterproductive to your goals, needs, and mortgage lead generation efforts. Music + Flash Intros On Your Mortgage Website = FAIL!
Author: Trace Richardson is the CEO of LeadPress.com ( free mortgage blogs ), a Mortgage Broker Website Design company and provides No Closing Cost Mortgage Refinance Rates at TraceCapital.com.
I’ve got to agree with you Trace. We used to have a flash intro. It took me probably three years to realize how much I hate to sit through an intro and go DUH – get it the heck off of my own site.
Flash intro’s were a fashion then , now they just look dated.