Is it a bad sign when the flash intro for your site (counting down the days until you launch) doesn’t work properly? I just checked out Podcast Ready, a Houston, Texas based startup that raised a $525k Series A round (more about the company here thanks to alarm:clock) and thought I’d check out the site. Give it a whirl yourself. I assumed that the “Sound” button would turn the sound on and off during the intro. Guess not. Maybe that button is just to turn the picture of the sound on and off. I guess they’re using their quality assurance time on their product and not on their site during the next 35 odd days. Oh by the way, I hate pointless background music on web sites.
Entrepreneurship + Startups
Startup: Podcast Ready
Discussion
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© 2010 (Sanjay_Parekh) == (Rambling). 
Is there web site background music with a point?
WTF are these people thinking with their music-playing, Flash-using web sites. If you think there is some remote possibility that I might want to listen to whatever lame, ambient BS you’ve put into your equally lame Flash intro page, then put a button their to turn it ON and see if I click it. Don’t just start playing and make me search for your obscure mute button to turn it OFF.
Wow. Sorry for that, but you really hit a nerve there.
And to make matters worse the button doesn’t even work. I could have also mentioned the lameness of counting down in milliseconds but I thought I’d let it go. Lest I get an email from someone upset that I was digging on something stupid their startup was doing (oh, and ask for me to REMOVE THE ENTRY). Clearly, I can’t imagine that ever happening. No one would be so silly as to go to those extremes, would they? But I digress… Shesh.
I do apologize that the sound button on the flash place-holder is not working for you. It seems to be working on my system, but I have asked the gentleman who wrote that for us to take a look at it. It was intended to be just a temporary place-holder for the site until we were closer to our launch date, but now that some information has leaked out and we’re getting some traffic to the site, I will see about making something a little more palatable.
Russell S. Holliman
Founder, CEO
Podcast Ready, Inc.
Yeah, it still doesn’t work. I thought it might be a Firefox versus IE thing. It isn’t. The sound button doesns’t work in either. Then I saw that there was a version 8 of FlashPlayer (I had version 7). Nope, not that either. But Russell, the point (or rather, the question) remains. Why use sound in the first place? It will likely annoy or scare people (those whose speakers are turned up and don’t realize it) that come to your site. I know I hate it when I’m listening to my music on my machine and some website starts blathering on or playing their music. You probably won’t ever see this comment since you were likely just searching around for comments on your company and decided to do a drive-by comment. So if anyone else wants to comment on this, I’d love to hear the rationale behind this sort of thinking that causes this to be good user interface design.
do you all have web sites or is it just your hobby knocking other people’s sites?
[...] For some reason the folks over at Podcast Ready have found my blog and taken offense to what I wrote about their web site. At least the CEO, Russell Holliman, had the courage to identify himself and say that their site was intended to be a placeholder and work would be done on it since folks were now visiting it. I’m not sure if I buy this explanation since some considerable work was done on the flash animation for it to just be a “holder” page. But I’ll let them have a pass on that. [...]
Please see comments on later post.