Wednesday, April 4, 2007

I wonder what does this button doo? (reloaded)



Well, I got it: the print-screens! Unfortunately, I'm pretty slow (in thoughts) and I couldn't get a print-screen of the progress bar...

1. The panel appeared: notice how it covers the text and its close button in the bottom-right corner:


2. I clicked the button. Notice how the advertisement disappeared but the panel didn't: the black thing is still covering the page!


The same webpage displays another advertisement, pretty much in the same way: a non-closing-panel on top of the text. But this was only the container: the actual ad was a smaller panel bouncing inside the container. And guess what: the close button was attached to the bouncing panel!!!! Sooo, in order to close it, I had to move around to catch it: of course, I missed twice so I got myself two popups opened by the stupid ad!

Finally, I had to reload the page until no ads were displayed at all (it seems it does such things besides changing the ad) in order to read something (a pretty interesting article after all).

This is to prove that reading newspapers online is one of the best things to do to "relax" -- it seems somehow that newspapers pick the most stupid programmers for their websites.

3 comments:

adina said...

The websites of newspapers are used, as the printed newspapers, to post advertisements. Have you ever thought that they do this on purpose? After all, they make money out of these advertisements published on the web site and in the printed version of the newspaper.

The purpose of the advertisement is to get your attention. And it will get it by any means and at any costs.
The publisher don't hire good a web programmer precisely because of the above reasons. A good web programmer will ask more in terms of payment and will probably not agree to all these pop-ups. So it's not in their interest to get a person to do the job well.

Not all people are bothered by these pop-ups, they just think: "I'll wait patiently for the pop-up to load, then I'll close it and go further." The next day he/she will tell hi/her friend about some commercial for some beer ...

My guess this is a vicious circle.

All the best on the Easter Holiday.
Happy Easter !

adina said...

Speaking of gsp, I'd like to know your opinion about the large, very large and red(who ever thought of red ???) font used for announcing the "hot" news...

P.S. Sorry for the grammar mistake I made in the previous comment... slipped my fingers over the keyboard :-)

anca luca said...

In the previous post I was asking what makes us return. If you own a business that people are very interested in (like gsp) you can afford to hire the dumbest programmers in the world (like gsp also) or even design the site yourself, even if you are completely out of the problem, because people will always come back to your site for the content (like gsp :) ).
But if this isn't the case, then you should think twice. It's not the presence of the ads that I dispute (those people have to earn their living, I know) but the way they annoy the user and send him away to the alternative, for reasons completely unrelated to the publisher and the content.