It happened over at Blog Content Provider. I had a reader leave a brilliant comment on one of my blog posts. It happens, but not often enough.

As I always do, I check out the websites of the people who leave comments because I want to see where they lead me. You never know when a decent comment might be left by a spammer or someone could be leaving you a broken link, which diminishes your search engine optimization efforts. I tend not to approve comments with links to websites that don’t work.

But this link worked, sadly. I clicked on the website URL only to be taken to a website that – gasp – employed Flash. Now, don’t get me a wrong. I think Flash can be a useful tool if employed effectively. But if I land on your website and get blasted with music while your website takes a minute to load, then I’m out of there. And that’s what happened. The commentator ruined their chances of ever making a sale even though their comment on my blog post was a good comment.

Here’s the lesson. Don’t make your website wholly reliant on Flash. The load time is too long. You have about five seconds to get someone’s attention and if your website isn’t loaded in that amount of time then your visitors won’t stick around. In this case, I waited … and waited … and waited … for about 30 seconds for the Flash to load. Then I was bombarded by moving images, none of which said a word about what the site was about. Finally, after another 15 or 20 seconds, I found out that the website was a financial services company. I could use those services. But I won’t be using the services from that company. Why? I don’t have time to wait for their website to load.

Note to Financial Services Companies: Don’t use my comment above about needing your services to spam me with your come-ons. Recognize a good hyperbole when you see one.