w.y.s.i…WTF?

Much to my dismay, it seems that some people still believe that opening external links in new windows “keeps users on your site.”

We have a part-timer who just spent her internship with us and now that school is back in session she is taking a web class and was asking some questions some of us about links. One of the things that came up is whether to link to other sites by opening in a new window. I am a big usability fan and see that practice as a negative experience for site users. And I have been hard-pressed to find any one other than clients who seem to think it is a good idea.

Until today that is.

Remarkably, one of the web designers (we’ll call him “Brett”) repeated this tired old line practically word for word. The most astounding thing is that when I said that it is pretty much accepted nowadays that it is for bad user experience and that if you are going to do it, at least let the user know with a little new window icon or some text, Brett wanted to know where I had read that.

Try an article and book dating back to 1999.

Not that Jakob Nielsen is the end all expert on all things (and he has been known to overstate things), but in this case there are hardly any real legitimate points to argue against it.

Which was what amazed me about the designer’s defense of the practice. See Brett’s only other full-time web job had been when he worked for a company that did well in the first dot-com heyday and his defense was that their company’s philosophy was that external links in new windows “kept users on the site”. What Brett couldn’t really defend when it was pointed out to him was that if the intent was to keep a user on the site, why in the hell would you link to another site in the first place? And that’s really what it boils down to.

Back in the day, when sites were supported by advertising that would auto-refresh every minute or so and they charged advertisers by how many impressions were delivered, linking to sites in a new window was a freaking gravy train. The customer would go offsite and forget that your site was hiding in the background quietly collecting impressions while you surfed other sites. But of course that is not how things work now, it’s just annoying. People don’t like that kind of shit - that’s why AOL and Earthlink pimp out that they offer pop-up blockers.

Another thing that I haven’t (yet) run across in all the articles regarding this antiquated practice is how it will throw off any traffic analysis on a site that may deal with time spent on a site.

When I report on site traffic and visitor behavior for customers, one of the things I list is time spent on the site. It is a strong indicator of what a customer is doing. Under 30 seconds, not what they needed at all. Under 2 minutes, maybe what they were looking for but not quite or they needed something really quickly (phone number, etc). Of course anything over an hour, probably a fluke. But if you shoot someone off to a new link, you skew those results completely.

So to sum it all up, regarding opening links in new windows:

• If you have to do it, let your user know (icon or text notice)
• If you want to keep users on your site, don’t link to anyone else. If you do link to some other site, suck it up and just link dammit.
• It will break the user’s favorite navigational tool - the “back” button
• It will cause the visitor to forget your site anyway
• It skews your “time spent on site” site traffic info.

And now for the final cliche summary…..

If you love something, set it free… blah blah blah. you know the rest. And it still applies.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to go smack Brett upside the head with my 1st edition of Designing Web Usability.

UPDATE: It looks like the standard method of linking to a site in a new window (”target=’_blank’”)  is deprecated and is not supported under XHTML strict. So find another way if you need to, like Javascript. But if Javascript is turned off, it will just link to the other site in the same window, so why waste the time with the extra coding in the first place?

If you are applying for a job with my company, I schedule an job interview with you at 10:30 and then you show up 30 minutes early at 10:00, that pisses me off. It pisses me off worse than if you showed up 10 minutes late.

When I schedule an interview I pick a time that works for me, so if you show up 30 or 45 minutes early, I don’t see that as “I’m on time and even 30 minutes early! I’m a great candidate!”. I see that as being inconsiderate of my time. So since you decided to show up early, I now have two choices: 1) rearrange what I had planned and see you early or 2) leave you hanging around waiting. Since my office is very small and the only place to wait is right in the middle of the busiest work area, if I make you wait, I now bother all my other co-workers, because they are distracted and uncomfortable with you just twiddling your thumbs in the middle of their workspace.

So don’t show up any more than 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I might send you off and tell to come back at our scheduled time. And that’s not a good way to start things.

As an internet jack-of-all-trades, I quite frequently engage in search engine optimization and link building for our client sites. A part of trying to bump up my clients’ search rankings has always been trying to get a better, more keyword-relevant listing in DMOZ open directory project. For those who don’t know what DMOZ is, here is how they describe themselves:

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

Great idea. Why is it important for Search Marketing. Well why is anything important to a search marketer? Google. yes, Google. Google uses the results from DMOZ to drive the directory and supplemental results. That’s why it is important.

So without going into details, I spent an awful lot of time at many points over the last few years trying to get various legitimate changes made to listings (a product line mentioned in a description was no longer produced, a primary domain was changed, and some copyright and trademark status changed - all legitimate reasons I would think). But the problem is that there was never an editor for those categories. Could I volunteer? Well the site sure said I could, but apparently the powers-that-be didn’t seem to think so. See they have this application process that stopped just short of a piss test. I worked as a baggage handler for a major airline in college and had to go through less jumping through hoops. But jump through hoops I did, and eventually found myself as the editor of a much smaller category to edit (because I heard that was the way to get in, start small and move your way into the categories that are abandoned or not claimed or at least have direct line to those that may be able to make a change). Did it matter. No. Could I advance into the other categories? Nope not enough editing history, understandable. Could I get a response from an editor regarding a valid change to one of their subcategories. Nope, no explanation, just no response. Well, it got old real quick. And I stopped caring, to the point where when I got a notification that my editor status was being terminated due to lack of inactivity, I shrugged it off.

I just didn’t give a shit about DMOZ anymore.

And apparently I am not the only one who understands that DMOZ/ODP is a flawed and broken system. Google, Yahoo and MSN all agreed to support a new meta tag attribute (”noodp”) whose sole purpose is to allow a site owner to say “Hey, please don’t use that shitty DMOZ description when you are telling people about my site.”

The Big Boys have pretty much said that the system is broken, but are not getting rid of it entirely. I can’t remember who said it, but so far the explanation that makes the most sense is that they are keeping it around because on some weird level it shows support of the Open Source ideology. I have seen the equivalent several times in my professional career. Management demotes or effectively neuters an employee that they are afraid to fire for fear of Bad PR. Management hopes the employee will just go away, but that employee will always hang around as long as they can, contributing less and less value to the organization, and probably still getting paid the same.

So Google. Cut the dead weight. You Are Google. You can do what you want. We will still do what you say.

And consider this. It’s not the few self-righteous META Editors of DMOZ that set clients up with huge AdWord campaigns. It’s guys like me. And the DMOZ editors are likely too busy refining their Editorial Guidelines to publish sites that help make money selling advertising for AdSense. It’s guys like ShoeMoney.

And now we get to the reason for this post in the first place. (yes it did take long enough to get here).

As I mentioned, I do SEO for many of my clients, so I recently got back from SES 2007 in San Jose and I caught the tail end of a session on making money with contextual ads with a panel that included Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker, a very active blogger and web publisher who focuses on leveraging different aspects of the Internet for fun and profit. Now I had heard of the guy, hadn’t really checked out his site, but in the session he had some interesting things to say. And apparently he is beginning to be somewhat of a controversial character in the Web Publishing and Search Engine Marketing world -especially now and especially when it comes to DMOZ.

So when I got back from SES, I checked out his blog and whoah, boy…

Apparently he recently received an email from a DMOZ editor telling him to cough up $5000 or his listing in DMOZ would be dropped. Ha ha. Except he didn’t pay. And his site got dropped. Hmm. Not so funny. He tells the tale and many of the follow ups…

DMOZ Extortion

DMOZ Editors: come out, come out

And others are starting to see similar, questionable behavior.

The DMOZ mob strikes again…

These are some pretty damning claims, so it just reinforces my low opinion of DMOZ. I have gotten by pretty fine without it and I am sure more and more people are doing the same. At SES, there was a lot of talk about a lot of sites and tricks and I don’t remember hearing anything (positive at least) about DMOZ other than to not bother unless you had an in.

And what DMOZ doesn’t seem to realize is that the SEO guys and gals are the only ones who even gave a shit about them in the first place. And when we stop caring, no one else will.

As kids (and morally questionable adults), who hasn’t wished for X-ray vision? Superman had it. Of course, he used it fight crime- truth, justice and the American Way - and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that my wish for X-ray vision was always for more …um..”personal” reasons. But I digress.

Well now web developers and designers can have the equivalent of those dirty little night-vision Sony handicams to point at websites with this little gem I ran across this week. Everyone I have shown it to so far has been amazed and it has taken a top spot in my web tool kit.

It’s called, quite simply, XRAY and it is a Bookmarklet that you add to your bookmarks and then whenever you want to “x-ray” a site, you just click on the bookmarklet and it will evaluate the page and provide an overlay will all sorts of CSS style information. One of my favorite features is the ability to navigate back up the page elements like a breadcrumb trail (in picture below see under “instance hierarchy”).

Here it is in action on this site - click for larger image:

Hope you enjoy

So the work week is done (yeah, right) and I was relaxing by checking my stats, and it looks this site just lived up to it’s name . I feel like a Dad who came back from a weekend trip to find out that his shy, quiet child threw a 4-keg blowout where the whole high school showed up. And I could’nt be happier (Hey, the kid didn’t break anything and this means he must have friends).

So while I was busy at work handling impossible turnaround times and being chastised for my lack of psychic abilities, this site went off and got itself noticed to the tune of over 750 visitors in just 3 days at the end of July. Considering that the days leading up to the deluge of visitors, the site averaged 2.84 unique visits/day for that month (yes most days ZER0 people), you can begin to see how unexpected it is.

Why, you may ask? Looks like UserFriendly.org had some people curious about “WYSIWTF” that day.

(plus the comic was also submitted to Digg so this may be the closest I ever get to the Digg-effect)

Thanks for the halo traffic, Illiad!