supersonic feet

I just got driven temporarily insane by the advertising for Rockband on colleghumor.com. Like a number of entertainment/portal sites, they have ad deals where an ad effectively takes over the background of the page, around the outside of the content area. This morning it was Rockband.

Before getting to the detail, I should say I’d probably have just as much trouble with any of the other sites that run ads like this, assuming they do it the same way, but as I’ll mention shortly it was even worse on CollegeHumor due to the content of their pages and what happened on the Rockband site.

The core problem I had was down to the way I tend to browse, which in all possibility makes me a bit of an edge case. In short, I tend to click in the margins, or whitespace, of pages before scrolling to make sure the window is focussed. I think this probably stems most from me having a dual-monitor setup where the active window could be on either screen (hence the edge case bit). It’s also a bit of a habit from Photoshop to click in the background somewhere when ‘idle’ so that no layers are selected.

Unsurprisingly, I clicked on a bit of black background out of habit and it turned out to count as a click on the advert. Here’s a shrunk-down screenshot of the site:

As you can see, while the ad content takes up a fair bit of space, even on my 20″ display, there’s plenty of empty black space. Turns out that the entire background area of the page (everything outside the central content area) is a link for the ad. So even if you’ve scrolled down a couple of screens worth and can’t see any advert, clicking in that area will launch the advert target (see red area below).

At this point, it’s a really irritating type of advertising, drawing clicks when it’s clear the user isn’t intending to click on the advert (that they might not be able to even see anymore). What made it worse is that clicking the link takes you to a site that does something even more irritating: it resizes your browser window!

To have accidentally clicked an ad and have a new page load is annoying. To have a new page load that starts messing with your browser is just infuriating.

Now to why the College Humor site took this to the next level for me: it’s really hard to find areas of the homepage that aren’t links. Of course as I read on, I compulsively wanted to be clicking in empty areas to switch back to Firefox from Photoshop or whatever else and the target areas are tiny. Obviously according to Fitts’ Law, you want links to have a large enough target area that users don’t miss and the site does this, as many do, by having full blocks be clickable.

Here’s a screen with all the link areas highlighted:

On CH though, it meant I still ended up clicking in the black outer area because most of the content area is link blocks and launching the ad link again, resizing my browser. It was like a vicious cycle of my ingrained habits vs. Fitts’ Law taken to such an extreme it had gone the other way and I was clicking on all kinds of targets I wasn’t trying to.

Anyway, rant over; I just needed to write this all down.

A year ago, Marks & Spencer announced a 5-year plan to become carbon neutral. This was a good thing.

I have an M&S credit card, so every month they post me my credit card statement. The envelope is always quite thick, but not because of my statement - I rarely actually use the card - but because they invariably include at least 2 glossy leaflets for various other financial services like insurance and loans. This has been irritating me as a total waste of paper for the few months I’ve had the card (though I haven’t actually made myself call them to complain).

Today I received an email from M&S Money titled “Save paper. View your &MORE credit card statement online”. The content is basically as the title suggests - they’re asking if I’d like to stop receiving paper statements and just check online instead (a laudible plan, though I’m not sure whether to give up on paper records of something as important as financial information) in order to cut down on paper waste.

What I’d really love is an “I still want my statement, but forget the marketing nonsense and the return envelope which I never use” option. I’d choose that in an instant.

Amazon just did a great thing - they surpassed my expectations of their customer service.

Unless you live under the proverbial rock (or just aren’t much of a geek), you’ll be aware that there’s a computer game by the name of Halo 3 coming out rather soon. Being a bit of a Halo fan-boy (I used to help run one of the big Halo fan sites, Haloplayers, now dormant) I had pre-ordered myself a copy of the Halo 3 Legendary Edition all the way back in March when it was first made available for pre-order. As the game is due for release in 11 days, I logged in to check that my pre-order was indeed still there and would arrive on time.

“Delivery estimate: 29 Nov 2007″

Uh oh.

This is a popular purchase (the game reportedly has over 1.5 million pre-orders and the Legendary Edition sold out the day it was made available for pre-order in most places), so I was quite worried by this estimate of a 2-month wait.

More out of hope than expectation, I filled in the customer contact form on Amazon’s site to ask if the estimate was correct. I’ve never actually needed to contact Amazon’s CS department, but being the big company it is, I wasn’t expecting great things.

A few hours later, I’ve had a reply apologising for the error and assuring me that the estimate will be fixed soon, but that the real estimate is much earlier than the 29th of November. I’m now a happier bunny.

They didn’t quite go as far as telling me what the ‘real’ estimate is, but the email did its job of reassuring me that it’ll be soon and I’m willing to wait a week and see what it is.

So, Amazon impressed me - they replied quickly (on a Saturday, too), were polite and answered my question first time. The rest of the email did get into a bit of a boilerplate grovelling letter asking me to understand that they do their best to ensure accuracy, blah, blah and they hope I’ll give them another chance. To be honest, I don’t think that bit was necessary in this instance, but it didn’t hurt.

Is it just me, or does Amazon need to at least add an account option to opt out of the nonsense spam leaflets they send with every purchase you make?

I just ordered a CD (the new Go! Team album, which is every kind of awesome) and got 3 ad leaflets along with the CD. They’re getting quite annoying and it’s just wasted paper. At least email spam only wastes your time and temper, not trees (though if both kinds could end, that’d be just spiffy).

Probably nothing new to many developers and indeed I’m pretty sure I’ve seen sites with the little icon on before, but today I got pointed at Silktide’s Sitescore properly. It’s pretty cool.

The site allows you to enter the URL of your website and it’ll then give you back a report and score to let you know how ‘good’ your website is. The tests cover marketing, design, accessibility, experience and a visitor rating system. I put this site through the tests and it came out with an overall rating of 7.8 to start with as I had a couple of HTML validation errors (mostly to do with the Amazon/flickr links), but after a couple of minutes tracking down un-encoded ampersands and erroneous border attributes my Accessibility rating went from 6.2 to 10.0.

With my Sitescore now up to 8.5 it’s obviously worth sticking the little icon on my site (bit of ego-stroking for me and the free linkage for Silktide). The only thing really keeping me under a 9+ rating seems to be that not enough people link to this site, but I knew that without Sitescore telling me.

This tool is an excellent example of a company gaining some good PR by providing a free service to not only potential clients but to potential competitors too. The tool is extremely useful to other web developers. Yes, it’s mainly just reading in data from other tools such as the W3C Validator, but we all love a good tool that consolidates a number of other related tools into one. People are lazy like that.

By having the rating icon for sites that get above a 7.0 to display their skills to the world, it also gets other developers (and therefore competitors) to give Silktide some free advertising, as the buttons link back to the Sitescore (Silktide) website. This is fine by me and a rather sensible way of doing things. They could have charged for the tool, but by making it free and encouraging the use of the buttons on rated websites, they get free advertising and kudos from the community (I’m writing this aren’t I?).

My only niggle is that my button still seems to be showing 7.8 - I just made changes and got an 8.5 damnit! I’m sure it’ll update eventually though…

How ironic can you get? Adding the code for the Sitescore button invalidated the code and dropped the score back down. Should be fixed now.

I actually noticed this ages ago, but looking at it again it’s still a very clever way of filtering potential clients without simply listing criteria your clients have to meet before you’ll consider them (and therefore probably scare of/irritate clients you could have worked with).

What am I on about? I’m on about Bearskinrug’s contact page, where freelance illustrator Kevin Cornell lists some info about himself, a contact form and then a list of ‘helpful tips’ for people interested in hiring him.

The tips start with reasons for hiring an illustrator in general and then move on to general Q&As on accepted practice for contracts with illustrators. By doing this as a general ‘industry’ overview, Kevin avoids making it too obvious a list of dos and don’ts for working with him personally and therefore lessens the chance of the list seeming confrontational before client and producer even meet.

Further to the generalisation, words and phrases like “it’s proper to…”, “usually” and “it’s not uncommon for…” help to both guide the prospective client as well as suggest there’s room for leeway on certain points if absolutely required.
All in all, it helps to increase the chances that the people who get in touch will already have a good idea of how the process should go. Of course, plenty of people will miss or just ignore the FAQ, but the popularity of Bearskinrug and the humorous style of the site encourages people to readmuch more than on the average site.