Lately, I’ve been reading the Linux Distillery on iTWire. I enjoy the column but really dislike the design of the site. Look at these old-school buttons to navigate to new pages:

That raises another usability issue: pages. Man, I dislike pagination on a web page. I suppose it’s useful when you write a 5000 word article but I don’t think I want to read 5000 words on a website. I wonder if web magazines track bounce rates by pagination. Occasionally, I’ll read the first page of an article, see the pagination and bounce.

But on the Linux Distillery, I don’t think their articles are long enough to deserve pagination. I bet they paginate in order to serve more ads. In which case, they are putting the advertisers’ desires above the user’s which always creates a poor user experience.

Additionally, they have incredibly un-friendly URLs. Mouse over this link and check out the URL’s long query string.

Those aren’t good for users and they aren’t good for SEO.

Please stop with all the Trebuchet. It’s OVER.

From sloganeerist:

If the only menu on your restaurant’s website is a PDF version, you have to stop telling people your restaurant has a website.

My firm took a quick-turnaround job yesterday to transform an existing graphic into an HTML email template. This required a bit of graphic design and a bit of old-school HTML 3. Our CEO asked one of the UI team to stay late and knock it out. I was here for part of the time that she worked on it.

At some point in the evening, the client’s designer came by and literally sat behind our designer while she tweaked his original image and created the HTML for an email newsletter program that we do not use ourselves, ConstantContact. While I was here, everything looked hunky-dory, albeit it… ridiculously slow. I don’t know why it took as long as it did. Evidently, they were in the office til nearly midnight having started around 6 or 7.

Today, the client decided we screwed something up. I haven’t been able to catch the whole story because it seems no one actually knows the whole story. But emails weren’t sent correctly or something. As I understand it, the client bitched and sent her designer over to pace around outside our office.

So what do you do?

Well, we jumped. We’ve got two people working on the problem. The client’s designer calls the client to report on us. The client calls our project manager. The project manager tells our designer what to do. The client calls our CEO.

What I think we should do:
Tell them to go fuck themselves and remove all our code and design from the web. There’s no way they saved it for themselves.

Okay, maybe we shouldn’t say “fuck,” but I think it’s a losing proposition. We had a designer in the office work 5 hours of overtime to get this project out the door yesterday. She had the client’s representative sitting behind her approving every single click she made. And the client has a problem today? Fine, take your business elsewhere. This could not be worth it. I heard the total price was $1000. So how far do we go to recoup just a bit of our losses?

The downside? Our rep? I don’t think so. Most likely, everyone who knows this client knows she’s a pain in the ass so how could her negative feedback hurt us? If her contacts don’t know her as a pain in the ass, it’s probably because they themselves are pains in the ass and we don’t want them as clients anyway.

The plus side of kicking the client out the door is that it will engender a whole lot of good will from our designer who is exhausted and annoyed. Also, it’ll save all the man hours now being spent by three other people in the company. And ideally, it would set a standard of abuse that we’re willing to endure for a small paycheck. Such a standard is incredibly important because it establishes in the company’s mind a baseline for other client dealings. “No” is an incredibly powerful word. Once you say it and draw the line, you really empower yourself to work with a better class of clients.

I had a former client ask me this question today:

from what you’ve seen in traffic [on his site] what kind of revenue stream do you think is likely with the traffic here?

My reply:

Frankly, I have no idea how blogs make any money. I’ve had modest success with AdBrite.com and Google’s AdSense.com. But on blogs getting hundreds of hits per day, those still only draw about $5 a month, if successful. I think one method blogs have had success with is putting ads in their RSS feeds to serve those users who read blogs in an aggregator like Google Reader. As a user though, I don’t like that experience.

BlogAds.com seems to do very well for certain niche blogs. I know it’s used to great effect by the top gossip blogs. I had some luck with it but to get any advertisers at all, I set my prices as low as the service allowed.

I think an effective strategy is a combination of many efforts. BlogAds, AdSense, Amazon Affiliates. If one jumps out as a money maker, drop the others and hone that one.

It’s a difficult proposition to make money on a blog based solely on traffic. At a BlogCon a few years ago, I sat in a panel with Henry from BlogAds and he was peppered with questions from bloggers wanting to know how to get Levis and Coca Cola to advertise on their blogs. I thought this was the wrong strategy. I just wanted the bar down the street to buy a $10 ad on my music blog. I still
think that sort of local niche could work well for the blog and advertiser. But it’s a lot of leg work for a little money.

I know that’s not a really satisfactory answer. Take my remarks with a grain of salt because I’ve thrown in the towel as far as making money on blogs. To wit, in two and a half years, I’ve never received a payment from Google AdSense because I’ve still not reached their minimum payout.

That said, one place to start would be here: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/. There is a lot of great information about improving your blog’s search engine results. With popularity, there is probably money.

Those remarks are actually tempered. It’s not just that I think it’s hard to make money blogging, I don’t think you should even try. Especially not on a personal blog. But even on single-author blogs that cover a certain “beat” (political blogs, for example), I doubt the efficacy of advertising efforts. Even if they bring in your server costs each month, they’re generally a lousy user experience.

I still use them on sites I create but I usually pick one ad solution and stick to it rather than plaster all sorts of ads on a site. But in those instances, I still don’t like them and wish for a better solution.

Related to my last post… TechCrunch writes about the Yes On 8 Google ads. They note that they’re seeing the ads on their site. And of course, because the post on which they discuss this is now relevant to the ads, they get served another one at the bottom of the post. Ouch.

TC does point out something hilarious in the whole cyber battle over Prop 8… YesOnProp8.com redirects to NoOnProp8.com. Hahaha.

I’m skimming through posts from a great blog called ’skine art which is all drawings from people’s Moleskine notebooks. I’m reading it in Google Reader of course, so I’m just getting the RSS feed. ‘Skine Art has added Google AdSense to their RSS feed to deliver ads to their readers like me who don’t visit skineart.com.

ANYWAY, every single post contains an ad for Yes on Prop 8 (which if you don’t know, is the California Proposition to ban gay marriage through a Constitutional Amendment. Yes being the “yes, ban it” side of the issue.) I bring this up not to argue the political point but to point out the expense of this advertising campaign.

It’s my understanding that the way Google Ads work is this: Google allows advertisers to bid on keywords which match content on websites (or Google search pages). The better your ad content matches the content on the site or search serving those ads, the less you pay. The reason being that Google values the user experience higher than the advertiser.

In other words, if you want to advertise your anti-gay marriage stance on a blog that shows nothing but drawings of birds and landscapes and bicycles, then you are going to pay a ridiculous amount of money to do so. Because your ad is completely unrelated to the content of the site.

The only reason I am getting served those ads is because Google recognizes my IP as being in California. So the Yes on Prop 8 people are buying anything as long as the location of the user is California. That’s an enormous amount of money to spend on propaganda meant to influence voters to ban two people in love from expressing it in marriage.

ADDENDUM: Some examples of the ad in “context” of the skineart.com posts below. Incidentally, hey ’skine art, I think you can reject these ads from being shown on your site if you’re so inclined.

(continue reading…)