Animation on a website

Hi,

I have a question.

When it comes to animation, it seems to me that the consensus among my
fellow website developers is one of disapproval. Why?

I just now noticed that, among my business clients, the most asked for
feature is animation. I guess I never paid attention to that fact because I
*always* pitch animation to my prospects. Indeed, most of my commercial
websites employ animation to some degree.

But what brought this to light for me - the disparity between what "they"
want versus what "we" want - was a get together I was at last night. I was
among friends and acquaintances; people who surf the internet but are not in
the internet business. Most of them are business owners, some are employees.
We were surfing the 'net and the comment kept coming up, "There's no
animation on this site. It looks boring. Static. Not alive".

Bear in mind that these are people in their 30's, 40's, & 50's. Not the MTV
crowd.

Of course, this was not a scientific study. And I'm not basing this question
just on the gathering of my friends; remember, I get the same comments out
in the field pitching small to medium sized businesses and I've been at this
now for almost 18 months.

So shouldn't we pay attention to what our audience wants and not be so down
on animation? (Except, of course, for those gawd-awful clip art animations!
That's *not* what I'm talking about!)

Or is it just my imagination, and you really *do* like animation?

Thoughts?

Regards,
Demitrius >I<
------------------------------------------------A. Demitrius Lopez
       W  E  B  S  I  T  E     D  E  V  E  L  O  P  E  R
             http://members.aol.com/mrdemitri/
------------------------------------>I<------------------------------------

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