Rian van der Merwe:
I’m worried that the wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs.
Rian has some images of Web sites that he doesn’t like and some thoughts on the dilemma facing publishers and readers.
Thanks for the shout-out, Jim!
You’re welcome 🙂
So true. Nearly every news site out there is cluttered, gimmick loaded and jumpy to the point of unreadability. Less is more. They don’t get it.
As a Formula One racing fan I used to frequent a very informative F1 site with good writing and content. After a site redesign they had anywhere from 5 to 10 constantly jumping animations on every single page. It – was – un – read – able – ! The longer I did try to stay and read a particularly good article despite the multiple moving distractions, the closer I came to having a fit of apoplexy.
I emailed them a half dozen times to make very reasonable complaints because their content was still good. Not a single response. I moved on.
Here’s one on the same topic Jim and you even cop a mention.
http://inessential.com/2011/11/22/the_pummeling_pages
I did a separate one on Brent’s 🙂
http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/11/23/reading-the-unreadable-on-a-news-site/
I really hate the ones that force you to click through 15 pages to read a 500 word article that is fitted inside a small box at the top of the page (the rest of the page being ads and links to more of the same type of articles).
Yeah, noticed that post right after I posted my comment. That’s what you get for commenting at 6 am before the first cup of coffee. But hey, kudos to being noticed for all the right reasons. Keep it up Jim.