Today one of our clients wrote to Brent:
We need to remove the dog image. There was a list of approved assets for launch. I’d like to make sure they are implemented. The dog is approved for use, but not for launch.
That reminded me of the classic Click for Cluck situation we had many years ago…
We have these two sound clips, one is of chickens clucking and one clip of a rooster call. We would like to make a sound clip using the chicken sound first for a few seconds and ending with the rooster, altogether maybe 5 seconds, when the website is opened. Only for the home page, not for the other pages.
My response, which I felt was pretty diplomatic considering how much I was laughing after the initial request:
I would recommend against this. Very few web sites use audio clips on their home pages, and playing sounds without having the visitor click on something is typically considered intrusive. In addition, not all browsers and operating systems support the same audio formats so it can be a challenge to have a format that will work across all platforms.
If you feel strongly about doing this, I’m sure we could work it out, but it’ll probably take several hours to combine the audio clips, choose an appropriate fidelity, convert to the best format, and add the code to make it work across browsers.
And the answer:
How about just putting a button on the first page that says ‘Click for
Cluck’ and let people decide if they want to press it and hear the
clucks and rooster call?
And thus was born Click for Cluck. Josh combined the audio clips and built the code on the home page so visitors could click on the link to hear chickens and a rooster. I think it stayed on the site for several years before we were asked to take it down.
Ahh, clients.
