Monthly Archives: November 2007
Nov 30, 2007 by Matt | Posted in General
Newspapers and magazines are slowly starting to make use of the web. A lot of them have websites now, but they don’t seem to know what the heck they’re doing.
My major complaints are:
- No comments. I often disagree with articles (or find errors), and I like to leave a note. “Dead-tree” publications rarely allow you to post comments on their sites, and in the rare cases when they do they tend to be heavily moderated.
- Bad design. The web is not paper. You can’t treat a website like a newspaper/magazine. That means no “between-page” ads, and no newspaper-style front pages. Print design is not the same as web design; so if your publication is going online, hire someone who knows how to design for the web.
- Subscription content. You’re not going to get very far online if you make people pay a subscription to view your content.
- Lack of links. When “traditional” publications sites mention websites, they pretty much never link to the actual sites. Often they don’t even list the URL. Hoarding PageRank is just stupid.
Nov 29
You’re working on some changes to your website, so you put-up a message saying that the site will be down for a few hours. Your users won’t like it, but it’s necessary sometimes. If you have to block access to your site while you…
Nov 28
This is one of my favorite XKCD comics.
Nov 28
Do you use Macromedia Flash in your websites? While it gets some bad press (SEO and usability-wise), it’s got a lot of good uses. YouTube, and other video-sharing sites, use Flash to play videos. Some sites have Flash-animated logos. A lot of online games…
Nov 27
Gravatar is a service that allows you to have an avatar image that follows you around the web. Sites that support Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars) just ask Gravatar.com whether your (encrypted) email address has an image assigned to it. If it does, then it…
Nov 26
WhyDiggIsBlocked.com Is this a parody…or is it another maniac who thinks ad-blocking should be illegal? Looking at the two sites, WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com and WhyDiggIsBlocked.com are very similar. The designs are nearly identical, featuring the same blue-and-gray header. The sites both offer code to block visitors…
Nov 25
StupidFilter has been building software to filter-out stupid comments online. Digg, can you please implement this on your site when it’s available?
Nov 25
To optimize your search rankings, you should decide whether your URLs should have the “www” in front of them or not. This is a topic everyone has been arguing about lately. There are advantages to both. Reasons to use WWW Non-tech people need something…
Nov 23
The term “blog” has been in use for around eleven years now, and there are about 120,000 new blogs created every day (according to Technorati). Of course, not all of them remain active for very long (too many people start blogs and then quit…
