Yeah, size matters, but so does placement…particularly as far as Google AdSense ads are concerned. Use the skyscraper format for ads, putting them in the margins as opposed to banner ads across the top or bottom. Well, guess how much difference that can make? Poorly placed ads, such as banner ads down at the very [...]
Archive for November, 2009
Never hide headings
Nov 27
Remember how I said people look to the upper left? If you’ve been centering your headlines and subheadings, do you still think that’s a good idea? Well, it’s not. Yeah, I know newspapers, magazines and books do it. So do lots of other sites. But that’s just not where people want to look first. They’ve [...]
If you’re putting web links into a page, make sure they’re where people will see them—not in that bottom right-hand Corner of Death! Yes, people notice links in web content. They’re usually bright blue and underlined, so people notice them. Many people even read links before they look at headlines, I can vouch for that. [...]
Don’t Nest, Just List
Nov 25
Remember back in school when the teacher asked you to make an outline and you went nuts making all sorts of nested sub-headings that looked like this? The United Kingdom Wiltshire i. South Wiltshire Salisbury The post code i. My house Don’t do that. Why? Because the last few items could be out of sight [...]
What is frontloading?
Nov 24
Frontloading means that you start headlines, paragraphs and links with the most important words. The first words should communicate the subject of the headline, paragraph or link. This is not like writing a novel or a story, where you have time to be coy and not get to the point for a while. You’ve got [...]
When you’re running a website, whoever is surfing it is staring at the screen…but where? One of the biggest questions for website designers is, “Where are the user’s eyes looking?” Where do your eyes go when you read articles on the Web? What do you notice and what do you miss? Well, I’ve got some [...]
About extreme content sites
Nov 20
What is extreme content? Don’t worry—it’s not adult content, or graphic violence, or even anything terribly controversial. “Extreme content” refers to very large sites ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000…even 300,000 pages. Now why on earth would anyone go to the trouble to create anything that huge, other than trying to get into the [...]
Flash-based sites have been a craze in the past few years, and as Adobe compiles more and more great features into Flash, I can only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the Internet. However, Flash based web sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. So where exactly do we [...]