Entertainment For Lively Minds
Is The Word Homepage Too Busy?
Posted by simonb on 9 February 2010 - 3:07am.
What with the Flash ads for It Might Get Loud and the animated gifs, the Word homepage is currently a tad painful to look at. I recommend a dose of Firefox with a chaser of the AdBlock Plus and FlashBlock extensions.
BTW: It Might Get Loud is worth watching though the Jack White bits are a bit staged. It's worth watching for the grins on Edge's and Jack's faces when Jimmy plays the intro to Whole Lotta Love. They look like little boys meeting their hero. And I suppose they are. :-) Bless.
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Jack White is so SERIOUS
when talking about Son House. Compare him with Jimmy's delight in taking us through "Rumble".
Yeah I noticed the grins on their faces when he played WLL. The kind of thing that breaks through anyone's cool exterior.
And Jimmy Page's look of panic..
... when he thought he might have to sing near the end.
Does Edge really play to the seagulls??
Adblock
While ad-blocking software might make your browsing experience more enjoyable, you're denying the websites you enjoy the opportunity the pay for themselves. And if everyone used such software, it's absolutely certain that this website would not exist.
You'll probably say "aha, but I would never click on the ads anyway", but every time an ad loads counts for us, whether you click on them or not - in most cases it's not about the number of clicks, but the number of times an ad is viewed.
We have to accept that people are completely within their rights to choose not to view our ads, but those who opt out are depriving us of income. It may only be pennies in each individual case, but it does mount up - and while this may not affect our ability to pull in advertisers, it has a direct bearing on the the amount we can earn from them.
We could earn more by allowing more intrusive ads - pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, rich media ads that slow down page loading times etc, but we don't, because we don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment of the site. And because we've made this compromise, it's even more important to us that the ads we do show are seen.
Food for thought.
If you're using ad-block...
...you can just disable it on those websites you trust (such as this one) and everybody's happy.
PS: The 'Stop Autoplay' extension will stop any distracting ads playing while still allowing them to load.
You're right about ad
You're right about ad supported sites of course.
I would like to point to the Word rate card which says "All inventory is sold on a tenancy basis" So, if that's still the case, everytime an ad loads makes no difference since the advertiser has paid for a period of time. Of course, you'll sell the tenancy based on an estimate of impressions (I guess) - so yes, not displaying will have an effect.
Sorry. Don't usually complain about ads but the current home page has so much animation on it it looks like MySpace.
You are allowing rich media ads. The IMGL ads are Flash. Flash is rich media.
Tenancies
You're right, ads are priced on estimated impressions, and ad-blocking does affect that. And yes, flash is rich media, but what I wrote was "rich media ads that slow down page loading times" - we have pretty strict limits on filesize that means we're continually going back to advertisers and demanding that their ads are optimised better before we implement them. Of course, all ads make a difference to page loading times - so I should probably have used the phrase "significantly slow down".
Thinking outside the blocks...
It shows that the ad team have come up with a good idea alongside an ad agency to raise awareness of the film. Additionally, whoever is paying for the campaign is probably paying a premium for the extra branding which in turn allows us to use this blog service (servers ain't free, you know).
But....
I have felt the sharp end FL's tongue in the past for recommending Adblock, and while understanding he must follow the company line, I don't buy the "we wouldn't exist without..." mantra.
Then I'll rephrase that
The Word would have a website, but it would probably be a very slight affair indeed - it would certainly not exist in this form.
And it's nothing to do with the company line - I genuinely believe that you should be happy to support websites if you're regularly sucking down their bandwidth, just as I'm happy to click the "donate" button on websites I use that aren't ad-supported, or to do the same with freeware I've come to rely on. I've donated money to several sites and software developers, and I've also accepted money from the regulars at a hobby site of my own once it looked like bandwidth charges were going to cripple the service.
Websites can't survive on good will alone, and allowing them to show ads - if that what funds the site's existence - is a pretty small price to pay for the enjoyment you receive. Or at least I hope it is.
Donate link ?
Maybe you could try a "donate by paypal" link and see if this brings in enough revenue to reduce the advertising.
I suppose
that the thing which irks me about the whole funding issue is that to us innocent punters, the balance just doesn't seem logical.
For instance in recent months a presumably hefty chunk of moolah has been spent on producing an electronic version of The Word for fellow subscribers, which I personally think is nothing more than a wasteful novelty, admittedly just my opinion, but I would rather that money was used more constructively.
Or how about the apparent inability to get the mag to subscribers before its been on the newsagents shelf for a considerable time?, is the electronic version a compromise for not receiving the real thing on time.
I'm thinking that the answer will be that the magazine and this website have different petty cash piggy banks, and the blog has to pay for itself by advertising, and maybe you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned donating to websites, could it be the answer for this blog? I for one would much rather pay a small monthly fee for the privilige than be forced to view godawful garish ads.
All these things are a compromise
Yes, the electronic version costs money, but it hopefully people find it useful enough that the return it generates (in terms of prompting subscriber take-up or tipping the balance for those thinking of re-subscribing) makes it worthwhile. We're not IPC or EMAP, we're a very small, independent company operating out of couple of mouse-ridden rooms, and no decision to spend money is either taken lightly or done so without believing there will eventually be a way of making it financially viable. In that sense something like the e-dition is a much better bet than, say, the podcast.
Regarding delivery, the problems we had with the last issue reflect terribly badly on us, but we can't personally deliver each copy, and if our delivery people mess things up there's not much we can do about it apart from work with them to ensure it doesn't happen again.
As far as subscribing to the website goes, it's something we've considered, and I'm sure it's something we'll revisit, but currently the numbers simply don't come anywhere close to stacking up.
Lightbulb moment
Could the mice be trained to deliver subs?
Thanks for taking the time to cast light on the workings of Word Towers, I wasn't being snarky for the sake of it, but maybe just a Paypal donation button would be useful for those who would like to lend a hand?
And by the way can you ask Hepworth the meaning of gulled, its a new one to me!
Donations
I'm inclined to think that websites should be one or the other - commercial enterprises who are ad-supported, or amateur affairs who rely on donation if it's necessary. I've not located a middle ground I'm entirely comfortable with. Yet.
Just asked: it means "hoodwinked".
The ads don't bother me
Most of the time they are at the top of the page out of sight. Like they are now. I'd have thought stick this site behind a paywall would see the breadth and variety of contribution dry up pretty quick.
Yes, too busy. But in a different way
No problem with the ads. Wolf, door and all that.
But one minor suggestion. The site seems to move along at quite a lick these days, which is all good news, but it means threads can slip off the Recently Updated column pretty quickly and i know I can't be the only one who doesn't really look much beyond that. One's somethings slipped out of that Top Ten, it's off the map. Would it be worth making the 'recently updated' column longer, so threads get more of a 'window'? As I say, just a suggestion.
It's something I'm planning on doing
Once I've figured out a way of reducing the load on the database elsewhere.
Recently Updated....
....I was going to suggest the same. Fraser, do you think this is worth considering - even at the expense of parts of either of the two Hot Topics boxes?
FL, you beat me to it!
I was just asking my son the
I was just asking my son the other day if he fancied watching It Might Get Loud. Don't no why, the idea just sort of popped in to my head...
Ignorant question
Would the ads be the reason the whole site seems to take ages to load these days?
No
That's a database issue. I'm working on that.