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Some microsites are lit­tle pieces of joy. Some are func­tional ‘more info’ affairs. Then there are those that turn you from being pos­i­tive and excited to being frus­trated and annoyed.

Nam­ing no names, but take the Canon 450D site. Now, to declare my alle­giances, I own a Canon 300D (in fact it is my fourth Canon) plus a bunch of lenses and I am begin­ning to think about upgrad­ing. As such, I’m pretty excited about the brand spank­ing new 450D.

So today I got sent the reg­u­lar You Con­nect email which con­tained an invi­ta­tion to go to the Let’s Play site and take a look at the 450D. Per­fect for a Fri­day after­noon I thought and off I went.

The site opens with the oblig­a­tory pre­loader count­ing up. But on my Mac it counted one num­ber per sec­ond (with­out say­ing what it was count­ing up to ). I tried a dif­fer­ent browser, same thing. Then I tried a PC which sat blank screened for ages before finally count­ing up at a rea­son­able speed.

Lesson 1: give your audi­ence a clear idea of how much longer they are going to have to wait so they can decide whether they should bother.

Then we get to a choice of whether to ‘play’ in the city with an urban-looking woman or the moun­tains with a fleeced up guy. Hover over the nav and the two mod­els change places, the one at the back going nicely out of focus. Now, while this is pretty, if this was the rea­son for the pre­load time it really wasn’t worth it.

Les­son 2: remem­ber your vis­i­tors come to the site for a rea­son, don’t let the eye-candy get in their way.

I clicked ‘city’ and was intro­duced to a nav device that promised that I could pan round an image and the click a hotspot to zoom in and dis­cover more. I was also intro­duced to another pre­loader (a progress bar this time). And I waited again. Finally, it opened the image with the urban model poised to take the shot. As I moved my cur­sor the the edges it allowed me to pan around the image. There was one hotspot. Just one. No choice, no real inter­ac­tion. I started to won­der why Canon didn’t sim­ply run a fully pre­loaded ani­ma­tion or a video or any­thing but this.

Les­son 3: if you are going to offer the audi­ence choice, make sure there is some ele­ment of actual choice involved.

So I clicked the hotspot and, in the process, acti­vated the third pre­loader of the expe­ri­ence, this time a spin­ning wheel of dots (at least there is vari­ety while you wait). This (after a while) acti­vated another ani­ma­tion that placed the viewer inside the head of urban woman as she moved in for the shot. She shoots, she scores and you are then pre­sented with a new screen and a stack of pho­tos that allow you to flick through the camera’s fea­tures – all illu­sion of the orig­i­nal idea now (thank­fully) gone. Of course what you are left with is the most stan­dard of microsites (and not a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing one at that).

Now don’t get me wrong, hav­ing an immer­sive microsite expe­ri­ence can be a really lovely thing. And it cer­tainly suits the Canon pho­tog­ra­phy brand (and actu­ally, Canon did a much bet­ter job on the ear­lier 400D site). But this was just painful (and would have been even if it worked faster). As with doc­tors, the first rule of mar­ket­ing must be “do no harm” – a rule this site could do with heeding.

I still love Canon cam­eras, but I’ll think twice before respond­ing to their mar­ket­ing again.

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