My Drupal Blog

Kontera- is that what those little double underlined links with the ajax popups are called? Personally, I HATE those things. I've been designing sites for 10 years, so maybe I'm a little more sensitive than most. But I find them to be like sand in my oatmeal.

On the web, ads used to all clearly be separate entities (banners and placards) that lived in the whitespace around the web content. Over time, people started to get 'banner blindness' - they began to tune out content that they knew (from placement on the screen and visual treatment) was a solicitation. These little links that people are now sprinkling throughout their content try to move advertising out of people's "peripheral vision" and into the center of their focus. Unfortunately, the main thing they seem to accomplish is adding noise to the signal. Any time I've ever seen these, the links bear little or no real connection with how the word or phrase is being used in the context I am reading. So, the little inline popup ad ends up being something ridiculous like:

"Site Build
Learn about for Site Build
www.shopica.com
More info"

This is linked on the phrase "site building" from this very post. That kind of annoying jabber just causes me to add an extra mental filter when I'm reading through a site and noticing links. It puts grit in the gearbox of my mental processing, which is the antithesis of usability (as boiled down by usability guru Steve Krug - http://www.stevekrug.com/)

Anyway, my two cents - and thanks for the helpful Drupal tips.