sandwichesandapples

Great article from Aaron Greenspan explaining how and why he sued Google. As you might imagine, Greenspan had some difficulty in getting in touch with Google. It’s a problem I’ve noted before.

I freaking love Boing Boing. It’s absolutely one of my favorite blogs and I read it every day. Yesterday, they posted a plea for their readers to take a survey which would help their publishing partners Federated Media connect with appropriate advertisers. No problem. I love giving feedback. Click.

One of the first questions was what was my birthdate. Not “what is your age?” but “what is your birthdate?” They gave an example date to show the format. Okay. So I enter the sample date. You want to know my age range or even my age, no problem. You want my birthdate. Nah.

The questions continued in that vein and most were required. I ejected.

I don’t think surveys should even have required fields. I don’t think surveys should be that damn long. And as one commenter suggested “none of Boing Boing’s business” should have been an option for nearly every question.

I’d have left a comment on Boing Boing’s site to note all this but they require registration to leave comments which I also believe to be bad user experience. I’m trying to cut down on the number of sites that have my email and a password, not expand it. I never register to make comments.

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.

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.

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.

I was just surfing idealist.org’s non-profit job listings which I do from time to time. I haven’t experienced this before but after “previewing” 3 listings, they required me to sign up to view more.

This is bad user experience. It pulled me out of what I was doing, reduced the hits on their website, sent me to my email for a confirmation, and finally led me to blog about the whole experience. I hate being required to sign up for information that really has no reason to be behind a login.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get in touch with Google for any reason but it’s nigh impossible. Obviously, if they just had a cute two field “contact us!” form, they’d be inundated with crazy crap.

But still, as a web “master” I don’t want to search through twenty different help pages and forums and crap like that just to tell Google support that their CAPCHA image on google.com/addurl has been broken for ages and despite their “no problem just enter the form” message, the AddURL function does not seem to be working. Interestingly, Google’s search engine knows the page isn’t working because a search for “google addurl not working” returns several Google Groups pages with users complaining about the same thing.

Contact forms are good user experience. After all, sometimes you just want to tell a company something, let them know something’s wrong, help them out. Forums and FAQs are generally bad user experience.