My Drupal Blog - advertising - Comments

Hi Jay, thanks for your

Laurence — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:28:10 -0700

Hi Jay,
thanks for your feedback, and glad to provide useful Drupal tips.

As for the advertising, firstly with regards your point about usability, it's interesting that you see the ads as a hindrance to this. I'm a great fan of Steve Krug, and agree with you that usability is of the utmost importance when designing websites. As I said in my post, I have no wish to alienate my readers, and I'm new to this advertising side of things so Kontera has been a first time experiment for me up to this point.

Secondly, I would also agree with you that currently the Kontera contextual ads are not very well targeted. However, to be fair to Kontera they say to allow a period of up to two weeks for ads to adjust to your content, so I'm at least going to give them that long to see if they improve.

That said, I think the most democratic thing might be to let readers decide via a poll whether they are happy with the Kontera stuff or want to get rid of it - what do you (or anyone else) think?

Kontera- is that what those

jay mcdonald — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:57:39 -0700

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.

Welcome aboard! Always glad

mika — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:20:59 -0700

Welcome aboard!

Always glad to meet new publishers. If you'd like any advice on Optimization, we're here to help.

Mika
Publisher Services Manager
www.Kontera.com

Thanks for the

Laurence — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:07:59 -0700

Thanks for the suggestion.
I'll definitely look into doing that.

Documentation is a wonderful

Guest — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 06:53:55 -0700

Documentation is a wonderful improvement for any module. You should post an issue for the module with your documentation improvements. I'm sure your efforts will be appreciated.