24 October 2007
The Neverending Saga of Bad Webpage Decisions… Ad Placement and Impressions
Whenever I browse the internet, I am always on the lookout for good design, good UI, and other factors that make me say ‘wow, someone was really thinking’.
Lately, however, I’ve been on the lookout for site behaviour that really gets on people’s nerves. The kind of pages that can be a lesson to those of us doing UI design. Read on to see some of this week’s picks of Bad Webpage Decisions, and submit your own for inclusion in future entries.
This inaugural issue of Bad Webpage Decisions stresses the importance of putting your users first over advertising. It’s a mistake small sites and large sites make in droves. Yes, you need to make money, but at what cost to user base? I have 2 examples here from this past weekend that really drive the point home.
The first is forbes. I went to their site off a yahoo link, as the article sounded interesting to me in my house search. Cheap suburbs, or best suburbs to live in. Great. But, to see the results, I had to wait for a Javascript auto-redirect through each result. Their page was very slow today, so this took about 10 seconds of loading per result where I was just staring at a white page waiting to see the next result. I really only wanted to see the ones near me. So, I tried to post a comment.. you can see the comment below, and the error message that came up. Each time I tried to submit a comment again, I shortened my comment (length limit I thought), and each got angrier. The first comment was quite polite how it was detracting from my desire to keep reading. So lesson learned from forbes? Yes, the more pageviews you get, the more ad impressions, etc, but please don’t force your users to go through 20 page views in order to find what they are looking for. And, if you do, at least have the decency to use AJAX so we aren’t looking at a blank white page in frustration.
The second shame of the week is movietickets. I understand the desire to have your advertiser be satisfied, but there is appeasing them, and there is taking something too far. I counted no less than 7 advertisements on one page, all running the same exact flash ad. And, given the subject matter of the ad, I almost wanted to run screaming from the webpage. Imagine a parent trying to buy tickets for a children s movie and being greeting with 7 (there was one below the fold as well) horrifying bloody zombie movie animations. Now, I like a good zombie movie, but this seemed a bit excessive. Even if it was 7 advertisements for Shrek 18, it still would have been *too* much advertising. 80% of the page is taken up by ads. Even the default movie to search for was the ad spot.
So, please learn from these 2 sites. They certainly aren’t the only sites out there, and I hate to single them out, maybe in the future I will blur any recognition to a site by name, and just post examples. The lesson today is: be mindful of your ad placements and desire to monetize. A well placed ad is golden, but too much of a bad thing can cause your users to never come back.
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