What do you do, or have you done when attending a conference/seminar/talk where the speaker is providing misleading or information not based upon any research or standards? Does the little devil in you want to start asking a series of questions and publicly lead them to their doom? Do you approach them after the talk and ask about their sources/opinions? Do you just sit and watch in disbelief?

The Background:

Yesterday I attended a 'local' web seminar. By local I mean the city I live in had a 'tech summit' at which a variety of tech services companies did a dog and pony show about their services and a topic of interest to the audience. The purpose of the summit was to inform the local businesses what resources were available in the area, so they would not have to search for skilled providers in other areas. My business is based in Orlando approx 40 miles to the east of where I live. A friend of mine was presenting and he asked me to come along, just to see what the 'locals' had to offer.

At the end of the agenda was the 'web' portion of the topics. The last speakers were owners/developers from a local group of web development firms. They were the local "experts." When the last three speakers were done, I could have sworn I was in 1997/1998. It was difficult to contain myself as the speakers made made statements and put forth ideas such as:

(some of these I am paraphrasing)

- Splash pages (defined as a page with a logo or picture and a 'click here to enter site' link) are a great way to introduce users to your web site
- Icon based navigation is an excellent creative tool
- It's good to provide graphics or pictures with no labels so users will have to 'guess' and be 'surprised' by what they find (I could understand this for a kid's game site, but the example shown was a business site)
- Using introductory sounds on your web site can be effective

Later in the program another speaker reviewed how to analyze web statistics (standard stuff). At one point he showed the list of page views per page, and something interesting was revealed, no surprise to anyone here, there was an approx drop off of 33% between the splash page and the 'real' home page.

I really wanted to ask how a splash page could be important when the statistics displayed clearly showed many users never made it past the splash page.

In a major market they would laughed out of the room, but in this small market many of the audience members simply took it like the gospel truth. I just wanted to tell the audience, "it doesn't have to be this way!"