Nine things that bug me about internet publishing
In this guest post, Salli Jokinen highlights nine things she thinks online publishers should stop doing.
After 15 years of surfing the internet, I would like to highlight some of the negative trends that, in my opinion, are taking internet publishing in the wrong direction.
Not publishing dates in blog posts
Many Internet marketers are guilty of this. They do not publish dates anywhere on their blog posts, and when an unsuspecting surfer looking for specific information lands on their page, they have no idea how old the actual information is.
So when you say writing blog posts by numbers, you mean like ones called “Nine Things that Bug Me About Internet Publishing”?
Hi Ben,
In fairness to Salli, we wrote the headline – which admittedly is at odds with that very point. Her original headline was ‘Things I would change in the online world’.
Cheers,
Robin – Mumbrella
‘Hiding email addresses’ – reckon this one could be extended to include those sites with a contact form.
Hey, if I’m interested, I want to email you direct, using my mail program and including my sig file and associated social media links – I don’t want to have to explain myself to a blank form. Also, you don’t get to find out as much about me from a message submitted via a form.
Contact forms are like brick walls for me.
Regarding hiding of email addresses: this is primarily an anti-spam measure.
Any email address displayed anywhere on any public web site (or even hidden in the HTML page code) is going to be “harvested” and added to spam lists so you get a bazillion spams. Sadly, this means most businesses, and most savvy individuals, do not publish email addresses anywhere.
Obfuscating your address by displaying it (for example) as “someone [at] somewhere [dot] com” won’t work – the harvester programs know these tricks.
Don’t blame the company / blog – blame the spammer scum.
* do not publish email addresses anywhere ONLINE, that is…
Totally agree with the multiple pages thing – extremely annoying and offers the user NO benefit.
Auto-play video (or audio, for that matter) is unforgivable. Some sites are not quite as bad as others, in that they at least check that the window or tab is active (i.e. “in front”) before playing. But really, I’m getting sick of clicking “Don’t play” on the SMH site, for example. Even YouTube annoys me – I should be able to open a dozen videos in different tabs so they can all start buffering, without having them all start playing. (I should check – there may be a preference somewhere on YouTube to turn auto-play off…?)
Offer video – if I want to play it, I will.
I thought this article was written by a Year 8 schoolgirl. Reads as if teacher instructed “no less than 100 words”
1000 words
Agree about hiding email addresses and with Liz about forms. In the course of a business day, I often want to contact a radio station directly. Most of these ‘communicators’ do not have an email contact. Many have the bland forms Liz complains about.
In other words, they so filter the means to contact them that we just don’t. We avoid them, and go away. They successfully send out the message ‘go away, don’t bother us’. We just take our money elsewhere.
It’s a common corporate practice so we simply avoid dealing with them, and focus on real people willing to communicate in person. Simple.
Salli you are spot on !
Can you tell Fairfax about their autoplay videos?. Drives me batty and even mores so when it’s a video that repeats what is in the article.
“Video autoplay”
Dare I promte adblockplus on this site, but it can be tuned quite nicely to block these.
Cheers,
Me
You iz rong about LOLCATS.
IZ DOING IT RONG!
Oscar, if you register with Fairfax, and create a login, you can switch off autoplay on all Fairfax sites.
You’re welcome!
🙂
@Mike
Welcome to what? Getting datamined out your wazoo?
Just use adblockplus, it’s much more secure and banishes all those pesky 3rd party cookies Fairfax sites stuff onto your system.
You’re welcome 😉
CJ – incidentally, I have a simple mailto javascript that allows an email address to appear on a page, but breaks the address up, in the page code, in a way that makes it pretty hard for spammers to harvest – been using it on sites for years, with very little spam resulting.
Here it is, in the interests of sharing:
<!– Begin
user = "INSERT_FIRST_PART_OF_EMAIL";
site = "INSERT_DOMAIN.com.au";
document.write('‘);
document.write(user + ‘@’ + site + ‘‘);
// End –>
…re the above, Mumbrella’s system seems to have automatically removed the opening and closing tags of the javascript, alas……
Agree with Dave that hiding emails prevents …erm…contact. What’s worse is when there are no telephone numbers, so you can’t speak to a real person. if they don’t have a number they don;t get my business.
Wit observations. Congrats for the article.Certain.
Me – I use Adblockplus but didn’t know it could kill autoplay videos. How do I configure it to do that?
All the tactics outlined continue to work – so an equally valid title for this article would be ‘Nine techniques to increase your online traffic’.
So long as there are people in this world willing to fall for the same old gags, those gags won’t go away.
What would have been nice to see in this piece is some critical examination of whether these online tactics are failing or succeeding or how readers could help reduce their prevalence.
What I dislike about the Internet is that it promotes laziness – lower quality analysis, writing, editing, publishing, reading and commenting. Solve that and many of the content issues detailed in this piece go away.
For 5 mins it felt like 2003!
You know, you could have actually broken up this post into 10 different posts, each with 9 other do’s and don’ts.
Ideas for your next article: “don’t cloak your pages”, “don’t spam your users on Friday morning”, “don’t use pop-ups”, “don’t welcome the user with an online form”, “do use clever jquery for enhanced UX like floating nav”, “do let users embed your videos otherwise they’ll nick the code and it’s irritating for them”, “do use nofollow tags on links pointing out “, “do remember to check what’s in the title tag because having the image file name inserted in it instead looks unprofessional”, “do have a search function that actually works instead of, like in the Myer site, searching for “Chanel Foundation” will get you only one result, a PDF document about Australian Football.”, “don’t be lazy and stop posting PDFs on your site, it shows utter disregard to the user, especially if they are on a mobile, and for god’s sake invest some proper money in digital”.
Anything else? Oh yes, the email address thing, Salli, it’s a spam thing, by the way. I do remember it already being an issue in 2003 though.
ooh burn….. want some cream for that burn?
🙂 BJ