Observation about Cakewalk's website

Hi Sharke.
The orange dot is part of the slider. For every page that you put in the slicer you have an orange (or other color) dot. Right now there is only one dot which means one page. If they add more pages , then the slider will work.
 

another observation: there's no longer any mention of a mac version

All web designers should be required to do all their development on the slowest machine in the office, with a dial-up connection.
 
These days I have a fast connection, but those graphics-heavy front pages are very annoying if you don't. And the worst of them are the automatic horizontally-scrolling graphics that are so popular with music software vendors. They are just barriers to the information you really want. Give me static thumbnails and links, please.
 
Oh, and while you're at it, put the prices there, too. Don't make me click the Buy Now button to see how much it costs!

bitflipper
All web designers should be required to do all their development on the slowest machine in the office, with a dial-up connection. These days I have a fast connection, but those graphics-heavy front pages are very annoying if you don't.
 

 
I guess that's almost like how you have to take crappy phone speakers and buds into account when you're mixing. Actually I think testing for dial-up is going a bit far - sooner or later you have to ditch support for the outdated technology. I remember when I made my first website back in 2004 or so, there were still enough people with 800 x 600 resolutions to make one seriously consider restricting site width to that size, although a lot of people were saying "screw it, you can't let the stick in the muds dictate your design." A couple of years later nobody was worried about 800 x 600 resolutions any more. Web designers have at some point stopped worrying about people with dial-up connections, on the basis that if you still have dial-up then it's basically tough s***. 
 
A lot of sites these days have video headers too - short background videos which play automatically with promotional headlines on them. It can be quite engaging if done correctly. Now that must be a nightmare with dial-up, even though they tend to compress those videos down to a couple of megabytes and serve them over a CDN. 
 

bitflipper
And the worst of them are the automatic horizontally-scrolling graphics that are so popular with music software vendors. They are just barriers to the information you really want. Give me static thumbnails and links, please.
 
Oh, and while you're at it, put the prices there, too. Don't make me click the Buy Now button to see how much it costs!
 

 
Actually study after study shows that those horizontally scrolling graphics, or "sliders" as they're called, have a hugely negative impact on a site's conversion rate and SEO. I guess the reason is that you're putting important content in a place where barely anyone will see it - nobody waits for the next slide, they're too busy scrolling down the page to see what else is on there. I've spoken to a lot of web designers who absolutely hate them and are constantly frustrated by their client's insistence that their new site needs a rotating banner "like all those other sites." 
 
I can understand not putting the prices on there. Despite the fact that it annoys some people, the truth is that giving potential customers a price before you've had a chance to sell them on the product's qualities is a big no-no in selling. It results in fewer sales, simple as that. I used to help a friend out at his Xmas market stalls in Manhattan, selling gel candles. Nothing had a price on it. And for a good reason - they were quite expensive and when people just lift them up and look at the price tag, they'd put them straight back down and walk away. But when they ask you for a price, that gives you a chance to engage them with a hard sell, so we'd tell them about the quality and how much longer they last than ordinary candles etc. I remember one year the stall opposite was run by three artists selling their wares. Very nice stuff too. They had price tags on everything and would criticize us for not doing the same. Yet while our stall was always jam packed and resonated to the sound of a cash register opening (he made over $100,000 profit in December alone), these girls were selling nothing and I think most days took a loss when they factored in the market fees. I'd watch them all day, sitting looking at their phone or reading a book and just letting people browse. Invariably they'd look around for a minute, see the prices and walk away. I told one of them, you have to get up and engage these people, talk them into wanting the product before they find out the price. She said she didn't like to "hassle" people and if they wanted to buy then that was up to them. I guess the old saying "shy kids get no candy" is very true. 

I dislike the auto-play embeds and sites as well.
 
The ones that REALLY irritate me are ones that show a 30 second ad to get to a 20 second clip. Argh!