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Ad peeling away users?
Advertising shouldn’t interfere with the navigation of a Web site. I’ve already written about that blimp, which floats over the headlines and text of news site Ohio.com. Not to felt left out, Cleveland.com, Ohio.com’s competition to the north, also runs annoying, page-navigation-interfering ads.
A recent example involves a page-peeler advertisement for a PGA golf tournament.
Upon entering Cleveland.com, the ad automatically folds out, covering a major chunk of the front page, then, a few seconds later, folds back. If you choose to close it before it closes itself, you must click on the dark blue area at top, marked “click here to close.” Clicking the ad closed, however, does not really “close” it. When you move your mouse pointer over to the top corner to grab the scroll bar, the ad reopens, causing you to have to “click here to close” again, which really doesn’t close the ad — again.
In a partial sleep-induced coma one morning (where was my coffee?!), I must have repeated this process three or four times until I realized that I had to maneuver around the folded-corner ad to grab my navigation bar and scroll down the page. What a terrible user experience!
Advertisers struggle to grab users’ attention online. Eye-tracking studies repeatedly show people ignore banner advertisements. Usability god Jakob Nielsen calls it “banner blindness.” So page-peeling ads on sites like the Cleveland.com one break out of the traditional, ignored spots for advertisement online to capture readers’ attention. Do they work? Or better yet: Are they worth it? Probably not.
Return to Google search says ‘I’m somebody!’ again
A delisting from Google equals death, or at least the loss of a limb or two for major sites that depend on search-driven Web traffic. For NickGehring.com, it meant an inconvenience and a bit of embarrassment. It was like the 1970s version of me disappeared from the phone book.
I can’t say what I did or didn’t do that caused my site to disappear from Google search, but it has been fixed.
Most other sites I’ve created hit Google’s search within days. Me.com, however, took eight months. I finally remedied this oversight when I took it off my project backburner late last month. Before finding the solution, I made a few half-hearted attempts to find out why I wasn’t being listed.
I first tried adding my site to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools show users what Googlebot is encountering as it scans their Web sites and provides other useful information. I figured giving Google permission to collect all it wanted about my online affairs would help. It did not. However, after performing a keyword scan on my site, Google spit out a strange list of keywords that were definitely not mine.
I then skimmed my site for hidden bits of code or those weird words from the list, perhaps from an sql injection attack. WordPress blogs are particularly susceptible to these and other security problems. Because of this, I did a few things to harden my install but found nothing wrong.
Back to Google. Sitemaps Generator, a WordPress plugin, is an easy way to submit your sitemap to the three major search engines. After you create a new post, the plugin generates a new sitemap and notifies Google, Live and Yahoo about the changes via ping. Does it help your site achieve a higher ranking? The plugin’s maker says it doesn’t know but “it can help Google to index and crawl your page better which may result in a more complete index of your page.” Even with the extra effort, no luck.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Live both indexed my site, but no Google. Searches for help, including a couple of SEO companies’ forums, didn’t help either.
Finally, a random search yielded a great suggestion: Submit my site to Google for reconsideration. The Official Google Webmaster blog outlines how to do it. A couple weeks after submitting my site, it appeared.
You can only imagine my excitement. Much like Navin Johnson (aka Steve Martin in “The Jerk”), I knew I was “somebody” again. I am somebody!
Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.
One of these colors is not like the other
How can two Web browsers display the same graphic in different colors? They can’t — at least not until recently.
Color management, a term familiar to photographer and print graphic designers, is a forgotten art for many Web designers. Primitive low-resolution monitors limited early Web artists to a palette of 216 colors. Now, aside mobile devices, most users have high resolution monitors capable of handling millions of colors. A limited palette should no longer be an issue, but another issue emerges: The color profile you used to so lovingly turn out that graphic or photo won’t be recognized by most browsers.
Getting your perfectly tweaked photo to appear the same way on your Web site is challenging. I didn’t think about this until I began mocking a Web site for a friend’s wedding. A background image kept appearing a different shade in Safari versus Firefox and Internet Explorer. Imagine — a Web design problem not linked to IE.
Safari, as it turns out, has included color management since version 2.0. Firefox has it now, but you have to go through some trickery to get it to work right or download a plugin. A proposed future version of CSS will include the ability to specify color profiles.
Even with a profile specified for your graphic or photo, good luck matching it with the browser’s default implementation of CSS colors.
How did I solve my problem? I re-exported my graphics file from Photoshop with the ICC profile option unchecked. This turned my colors just the way I wanted to match the surrounding CSS colors — or at least I hope so. Even with the Web being able to display millions of colors, it still has a long way to go to display them right.
Template trends leave a sense of déjà vu
Smashing Magazine, an awesome online resource for Web developers, posted a story on online newspaper design trends. Visit enough of these domains and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu.
Smashing lists them:
- Color schemes – Most news sites use a white background with dark (black) text and blue links.
- Header and sidebar banners – Lots of ads in these places.
- Top navigation – Aside the New York Times, many news sites embrace top navigation.
- Tabbed content areas – Cram lots of information in a small space.
- Grid-based layouts – A good way to “manage and organize a large amount of content.”
Visit enough of these domains you and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu. Didn’t I just write that?
Lots of big new organizations of all stripes use templating in their designs. It saves time and probably makes supporting these sites from corporate HQ a lot easier. As things become more centralized and budgets leaner, these standard designs probably save money, too. Why spend months on a redesign when you need to focus all your resources on being able to report?
Advance Internet’s recently redesigned templates for Cleveland.com, OregonLive.com, MLive.com and Syracuse.com. Cleveland.com uses a hybrid of the new template, old template and a third blogging template for some story commenting. It’s rather confusing.
Gannett’s templates for Indianapolis Star, CentralOhio.com, Montgomery Advertiser and Cincinnati.com. Gannett launched these earlier this year, with the design originating from the Indy Star. Apparently the redesigns have caused a lot of turmoil. These templates, very much to their credit, push social media sharing high up on the front page.
Community newspaper powerhouse Gatehouse uses a similar set of templates on many of its 518 newspaper sites. Some are like my former employer’s site, while others are a variation of the Wicked Local brand, and yet others deliver news to the beat of a different template. All seem to have a gradient with a little bit of a drop shadow on each side of the content area.
Fox television stations that use the Fox Interactive Web template look EXACTLY the same. It’s not even worth posting more examples. Just take out “Cleveland” logo and insert “Tampa Bay” or “Twin Cities.” The templates boasts plenty of bevels, shadows and gradients, all in a red, white and blue theme. Very LOUD! I credit the Fox designs for not pimping out the 10 o’clock anchor team that no one cares about.
Smashing also compares blogs to traditional news sites. Blogs, as you would imagine, do a better job of integrating social networking, vital in the battle to turn readers into users, and users into members of an online community. I think more news sites should work like blogs. It’s already starting to trend in this direction — just a matter of getting those darn publishers to give in.
The Financial Times made its new site more like a blog with a vertical news flow called “the river”. FT also ported over the salmon color of its printed paper. Some things never change.
I would love to find designs that break out of the mold. Traditional news sources are unlikely to do this, though. Years of instituational behavior, coupled with taking themselves too seriously, mean few Web news sources are going to deviate much from the norm. Visit enough of these domains and you soon get a feeling of déjà vu.