Earth: Mostly Harmless

What’s wrong with today’s web media

December 6, 2006 on 4:21 pm | No Comments
Categories: economics, journalism, technology
Tags: advertising, economics, google, informit, journalism, layout, technology, the-long-tail

Have a look at this article at InformIT. Useful, well-written content - but it’s laid out so badly that you’re put off reading the whole thing by the ad-ridden multi-page badness that is their site design.

On the linked article’s page, you have to look past a network banner; a full-size ad banner; a header/login bar; a set of navigation ‘tabs’; a bread-crumb trail; a title; a set of descriptive metadata to do with the article; a toolbar (save/discuss/print/email); and a table of contents box before you get to the actual content. That’s 750 vertical pixels of page to look past - in other words, an entire screenful on a 1024×768 screen. I have a 1680×1050 screen on my iMac, and I can still only see the first six lines of the story in my RSS reader.

The article is spread over ten pages. Why? It’s only two thousand words long. This is something I see a lot on technology sites, Tom’s Hardware being the worst offender (example). To make matters worse, the table of content box (pictured left) is right where the actual content should be. It’s got a stupid AJAX collapsable header - the need for which just exposes the fact that it gets in the way. Personally, unless the story was extremely important to me I wouldn’t tend to read more than a couple of ‘pages’ from an article like this - clicking through just gets tiresome.

[Note: I'm about to put in a 'more' tag, which means you'll have to click through to read the rest of this story. This may seem hypocritical, but remember that you'll only have to click-through if you're on the home page of this blog, where it exists for brevity of the blog entry list. On the permalink page, which corresponds to something like InformIT's article page, the entire blog entry is displayed.]

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