ejcross.com » Firefox

Are web ads good or bad?

elliott — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:11:39 +0000

Today while checking in on my feeds to see whats new out there, I found a really interesting article written by Michael Martin of problogdesign.com. In his article, Michael discusses a growing trend of web users to use programs such as the adblock extension for the firefox browser. There seems to be some concern that the adblocker programs could pose a moral issue, and an interesting discussion took place that made me think heavily about the topic as I have begun to place a few ads on my site.

To quote from the site,

As is too often the case with human nature, what’s moral is much less important than what is convenient. Blanket ad blocking is not moral (How could it be?) but it is convenient to individuals. The question of morality simply does not matter. The question that matters is how much those issues will bother you.

The question that seems to be looming and growing leaves one to wonder if ad blocking is a moral issue, or merely one of convenience for the web user?

As for the morality of the adblocker programs that are out there, the creators of these programs have a niche in an area of the internet browser world that people need. Most people, myself included, get annoyed when they visit a site that has ten thousand ads all over the place. This leaves you searching for the content of the site, and chances are that you won’t be coming back. So, if you have an adblocker program installed, you won’t see much of the ads, if any. This can be a good thing for the consumer of the site, however for the site owner, it creates another issue.

As a site owner, it is my purpose to create money from my site. Whether my site is a blog promoting what ever interests me, or a commercial site selling my products, if you are blocking my ads, eventually I will be forced to find another way to promote my products. Since a lot of browsers have pop-up blockers installed already, I probably wouldn’t go that route, but there may be some alternatives. Maybe I could hijack your browser and force you to see an ad between each page you visit on my site? Sort of like the commercials during your favorite show on television.

That might be extreme, but it could be a possibility some day. With the wealth of information that is online today, and the amount of people searching, browsing and exploring the internet for information and products each day, ads are here to stay. Just pick up a newspaper and browse through it (you know, the old print medium without the keyboard and mouse) and see where the ads are in the paper.

Maybe one alternative to this approach is for the consumers to speak up and say that they won’t visit a site with an excessive amount of ads, and we as designers and site owners should be respectful of that fact. If we use ads on our sites, remember the main purpose of the person coming to our site is to see our content, not get flooded with ads.

What do you think?

Resize for your own eyes

elliott — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:15:24 +0000

There has been a lot of debate lately about how to design sites that allows for the most usable and accessible font size for each user. One of the greatest debates is how, as a designer and coder of a site, should in fact set the font size for the particular site that allows for the resizing in order for visually impaired users to read the site.

There have been widgets or javascripts that have allowed the user to click on a button that will make the size bigger or smaller to their own personal liking, however the better approach is to educate the user about their browsers particular settings in order to make things work better. This is because not every site has this widget or setting on the site to allow you to resize the font size to your liking. So, in helping to educate and spread the word like other sites are doing, I would like to help you, my reader, to learn how to resize your font size for your browser to make your viewing more enjoyable, and usable.

As was posted on accessify.com, a great video by Ian Lloyd shows how to resize your browsers font size to your personal liking. This helps both you, the visitor, and I as the designer, by allowing us to “work together” to make sure that the site is usable by all people. If you can’t see the video, there is a transcript available also.

So, you might ask yourself “What’s the big deal?”. Well, it comes down to the point as a designer that sites are designed with different screen resolutions, varying font sizes, and different perspectives on how a site should look and function. I can design a site that is using a base font size of 1em. This displays everything on your browser based upon your default setting, which is usually 16 pixels. So what does this mean?

If your default setting is less than 16 pixels, it might look really small. Or if your computer monitor is set to display at a resolution of 800 X 600, it might look really big. Each persons own preference is really hard for a designer to decide what will work best. This is where the usability portion of a designer comes into play.

Some browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari for Windows will allow you to resize the text by using Ctrl+/- or holding down the Ctrl button and scrolling your mouse button. Other browsers, such as Internet Explorer version 6, don’t play nicely with this feature. So you have to change a few settings to increase or decrease your default font size.

Internet Explorer 7 offers a couple of options, both are found under the “Page” tab. You can “Zoom” the text size, which basically offers a zoomed in version of the site. Or you can also increase your default text size from the default of Medium, and increase or decrease to your liking.

The reason I am writing this is in order to help spread the word to all users of different browsers that things are just as they are. You can change your settings in order to make your browsing experience better. Just learn a little bit about your browser, and hopefully, you have here.

You can view more about this issue on the accessites.org article about educating internet users about how to resize their text size, and on Mike Cherim’s Beast blog site.

I would love to hear about your experiences, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask via a comment so we can all share the knowledge.

New and powerful social networking extension for Firefox

elliott — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:49:07 +0000

While I was perusing the internet the other day, I came across a great article about a new Firefox extension for social networking. If you haven’t heard about social networking, it is a method of promoting articles and sites by “bookmarking” them to the social networking sites, such as Digg, del.icio.us and technorati just to name a few. By bookmarking the articles, people can rate them, share them and this really increases your site traffic and page ranking.

Anyways, back to the point of this extension. One of the methods used by power bloggers is to browse the social networking sites, and then be the first to post an article on a site that doesn’t have it yet. This really helps boost your page and site ranking. I’m not really sure how all of it works yet, but I am researching some things for a future article here.

Check out the extension from 97th Floor and I hope you find it useful. Thanks also to Cameron Olthious for pointing me to this extension. Plus, if your not using Mozilla Firefox, now would be a great chance to give it a try!