I am not a fan of the long-form salesletter, although my company works with clients who love it, and for good reason: it is proven to work… it makes things sell.
And there are the standard array of tricks and techniques that people use on these salesletters… you know the kind: highlighting everywhere, endless bullet lists, ridiculously huge and over-promising headlines, 1001 gushing testimonials, bla bla bla.
One of my pet peeves is the JavaScript datestamp (or the server-side one… whatever), that ensures that at whatever time you arrive at the salesletter/webpage, you’re made to believe that it was penned just hours ago.
Now, aside from the dubious ethics of this approach (i.e. a webpage that has stayed largely identically the same for, say, a year but was apparently written this morning), there is the risk that your programming is in error:
This delightful effort is from Gobala Krishnan (who may well have a wonderful little product he’s selling there), someone who’s Adsense skills are eclipsed only by his ability to travel back through time.
So to Gobala and every other long-form salesletter lover out there: I (personally) promise, if convinced to purchase your product on its merits, that I will not think less of you for being truthful about when you actually wrote your salesletter, nor will I think more of you because you inserted faulty (or not) timestamping JavaScript to try to deceive me into attributing greater “freshness” to your salesletter writing efforts than was in fact warranted (or truthful).
Sorry to pick on Gobala, and if I could be bothered I could find plenty of other examples to link to. For Gobala’s sake, commenters are welcome to add more examples below, so he doesn’t feel alone 
Anyway, please don’t miss my point… this is 2007. Bodgy salesletter trickery like that is LAME! It makes you look like an idiot. So don’t do it!
And I’m also talking to you, special-offer-countdown-runs-out-at-midnight-tonight people. We’re not complete brain-dead Neanderthals, you know! We know everyone gets the same countdown, coz that’s JavaScript too!
(Our test guinea pig Gobala tries a variation on this trick too… “Price May Change Without Notice After Tuesday, February 27, 2007.” Notice that big gap before the date? Little things like that are the first giveaway that there’s a script thing happening there.)
If you’re trying to gain our RESPECT enough to purchase your products, why treat us like fools?!
Updates
- Jan. 27, 2007 — Ah crap! Turns out Gobala is not a time traveller after all, and can in fact code perfectly acceptable JavaScript. The gremlin was a dear child of mine who managed to change the system clock on this computer (the family one) forward a month, creating (for me only) the delightful glitch on Gobala’s site. He’s not off the hook for using this technique (which is the main point of this post) — which I loathe — but relax folks, he’s not back from the future!
