Since I took a potshot at Steve Wynn yesterday for having a lame Website, Maryam and I went there today and dropped a few bucks in his casino.
First of all, he has the best signage on the strip. For those of you who haven’t been to Vegas yet, the main street that runs through town is named “the strip.”
I’ve been coming to Vegas since the early 80s. It sure has changed. Back then there was nothing but desert land between the airport and Caesar’s Palace. All that land today is filled with multi-billion resorts.
We’re staying in New York, New York in a nice room that looks down on the giant MGM Hotel.
Back to Wynn’s signage
It’s a huge vertical monitor with a twist. It has a huge gold bar that moves up and down above the monitor. As it moves it pushes the old video out of the way and brings a new one into view.
Anyway, inside the Wynn Las Vegas casino isn’t all that much different from any of the others. Except you can tell he likes cars. There’s a Ferrari dealership right inside the front door. They have only been open two weeks and they’ve already sold 22 cars. Not a bad business!
Overall impression? Very nice! We’ll be taking Maryam’s mom there tonight. She loves to play slots. Did you know that Steve Wynn is a geek, by the way? He sponsored a lunch at one of our Visual Basic conferences back in the 1990s.
Yeah, gotta brag about Windows. Microsoft’s products are everywhere inside the casino. XP runs all the computers inside the pits, for instance.
Maryam and I are having a great time. We’re acting like giddy teenagers. Pretended we were Bill and Melinda Gates inside the Ferrari dealership. Heh. Yeah, I can afford the $800,000 F-50 that’s on display there. Not.
Anyway, in between having a great time (saw a Cirque show last night) I’m doing a lot of people watching. What am I learning?
We live in a gadget nation
Digital cameras are everywhere. It’s amazing how fast film is getting forgotten.
I have a cautionary tale for Web designers too: you better be developing your sites for cell phones first and desktop computers second.
Why?
There are hoardes of people just staring at their mobile devices. I’ve seen Treos. Blackberries. Scoblephones. Nokias. Etc.
People are changing how they use their mobile devices. Last time I was in Vegas it was rare for someone to be looking at their cell phone’s display. Now TONS of people are.
And, guess what, your Web sites SUCK for mobile uses!
Yes. They do. Have you looked at your Web site on a mobile phone?
One of the projects I’m going to work on is to demonstrate just how bad your Web sites are (even the ultra-modern “standards-based” blogs mostly suck).
Why do even the standards-based ones suck?
Because many of them put their navigation code on top of their content code. That means that someone with a cell phone has to do 90 seconds of scrolling through all your navigation bar stuff before they can get to the content.
We need to fix that about our Web sites and we need to fix that now.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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