Barry Hand

There’s noth­ing free in this life, and if it’s free you must be will­ing to put in a lit­tle effort.

Take the pop­u­lar Word­press Auto­matic Upgrade plu­gin for exam­ple, now there’s a down­load link that’s reward­ing. It’s 5 screens down and tightly nes­tled along­side out­lined boxes and buttons.

Your expec­ta­tion com­ing to a site/page which pri­mar­ily serves one pur­pose is that it will be easy to find, not so in this case, I won­der how many lost down­loads and page bounces have been caused by that? Luck­ily the plu­gin is actu­ally damn good!

One of my other favourites is SUPER©, which is an all singing-all danc­ing encoder/decoder appli­ca­tion, find­ing the down­load link is an exer­cise in itself, despite hav­ing down­loaded it before on a few occa­sions, I still get caught by the labyrinth of links.

Now there’s an intrigu­ing remon­strance, Only 4 pre­reques­tices , Enable Javacript, Clear your Cache, & Don’t use any proxy jig­gery pok­ery. Sounds like a chal­lenge, but it doesn’t end there, the actual down­load is hid­den another 2 pages deep. Handy that.

But there are also sites which make it too easy, like PuT­TY­tray, How can you respect a down­load that gives you two easy meth­ods of down­load it, both on the land­ing page!

In sim­ple terms, if you want some­one to down­load some­thing, make it easy, use clear defined action­able items, even though what you’re offer­ing may be free, you still have to sell it.