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The Real Current State of Web Design

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124 pointsbradleyjoyce40 comments

I've always heard people suggesting that one should disable Adblock on sites that you like to support them. But I'd think most people who can will still block ads (I do; they're distracting). Trying to support the site by disabling ads seems to just encourage the site to continue using what will eventually be an ineffective way of making money.

Couldn't you make the argument that by disabling ads you're "voting with your wallet" and forcing them to find a more sustainable source of income?

AdBlock makes that site look so much better. In fact, their ad blocked layout is part of why I liked it -- now that I see what they meant it to look like, I'm less than impressed.

I work in publishing for a niche trade title and I hear this a lot. In fact, I loathe ads too. In the days of print, trade titles had a limited circulation. It was easier for them to get advertisers because the title was guaranteed to hit the desk of the CEO or CIO, which was the target for that particular advertiser. Now it's all about traffic and the competition online is far more intense. Sadly AdBlock will not revolutionise the entire publishing industry. Instead it will hurt it. It is only going to put more pressure on sales guys to hit their targets which means more ads at vastly reduced prices. It will also cause online publishers to close, and put people out of work. The rest will resort to sensationalist journalism tactics and those terrible list type stories: "10 best diets for a flat tummy". It's either that or a paywall system like Murdoch is putting in place. What is a 'more sustainable source of income' for online publishing?

I regularly read (quality) content online and think "I'd tip for that". But there's no way of doing it. I could click the adverts, but I don't want to deal with lots of popups and I have no interesting in buying whatever they're advertising.

I agree in that I'd like to be able to tip people for good articles (I've started donating now that I have more income).

But I don't think good will is a sustainable source of income, or at least not one that will work in the general case.

PBS?

When the journalism is good enough, people want to make sure it survives.

That would be an interesting addition to Facebook's like button. The site gets a dime and you get the option of having your generosity show up on your online social record. People often like having their generosity very visible to others.

Interestingly, Facebook are the ones who have the technology and critical mass to make micro-payments available. But I bet they wouldn't let you pay for stuff you like in private without announcing it to the world.

I really, really think that the answer is the ability to do micropayments (if not sub-cent, at least sub-dollar without losing most of it). Which basically means it's our current bank's / credit card's systems which are preventing such a change, because they charge so much per transaction. I've seen a few attempts, but they seem to be failing due to not reaching critical mass (probably because they're not advertising worth a damn).

Somehow, Smashing Magazine is broke. Their content is incredible but they can't pay the bills.

"I dumb down for my audience and double my dollars / they criticize me for it; but they all yell 'holla!'"

Smashing, your move.

Somehow, Smashing Magazine is broke.

From what they've said in the past, it's because of the Smashing Book they produced. They put too much money into making it just so, or something.

In terms of day to day costs of keeping the content flowing, considering the number and caliber of ads they've got, they shouldn't be having any problems at all unless they're really bad at managing their cash-flow.

"Their content is incredible" is true for the one article they pay someone to write, versus the 10 or so lists they publish alongside it.

How do you know they are broke? I'm interested to know where you're reading this...

found this relevant link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/22/smashing-magazine...

I am not so much against the adds on SM as I am against the content they use to create page views for those ads.

SM started out really nice and it's articles where actually interesting to begin with.

Now they are just diversifying out posts to cover anything of the slightest interest to webdesigners in order to get more advertising doh.

Nothing against that business model but I can find better ways to spend my time than to read about "10 trends/ways/free font/icons/to/ improve/help/make X"

Most of that is so simplistic and misleading it's not even funny.

Link baiting is the worse kind of traffic generation technique I know. Even though in short term it is effective and might drive people to your site, over time most likely the title/content will be irrelevant dilute the brands identity. I agree SM isn`t what it use to be, however I do still find good articles to keep myself up to date on current trends etc. and I don`t expect anything else from it really.

Yeah but I am starting to realize that keeping myself up to date is less about following hugely popular sites like SM and more about finding obscure but in depth peeps into the future.

If it's on SM it's normally past the trend phase IMHO.

In a perfect world, websites with 10s of millions of page views that pays for dozens of writers should have little to no ads. We don't live in a perfect world.

There are few sites where I disable my adblock+, SM is one of them.

The op probably don't have any experience running a big site like this.

Totally agree; I'd rather have the excellent content they deliver and a few ads. Most people just gloss over them, anyway.

OP - try AdBlock, or buying their book to help support them.

I think it was justified in this case, as the ads actually pushed the page content below the fold. There was literally nothing other than the article's title visible in that screenshot. Ads are okay if they don't impact the readability of the content; once the ads start making it harder to get what you came to the site to find, you'll find your ad sales figures dropping as users become confused and leave.

The bradley_outline.png background image on this page is 617KB in size. About ten times bigger than it needs to be. I wonder how much web bandwidth is wasted by poorly optimised images. Maybe there is a business opportunity in an automated tool to detect these ... just musing to myself.

Doesn't Opera's mobile browser do something like that? The requests go through an Opera proxy which optimizes images.

Yes, you are right, they are selling something based on providing a partial solution to a very small piece of the problem, and something like that ought to be able to produce stats.

Things like YSlow and PageSpeed give reports on optimising images but are run manually. YSlow gives a link to smush.it (compress the image via smush.it website - http://smushit.zenfs.com/results/50dfa0f4/smush//theme/4bc93...) which saves 60% and retains it as a PNG.

Personally I couldn't see the image until it was pointed out - so a huge waste of bandwidth for no design gain in my case.

Pingdom lets you test load times for everything on your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/

Open in Chrome, right-click the page and choose Inspect Element. Click Resources at the top.

Yes, I was thinking about it in broader terms of the total bandwidth consumed on the web by these things. Say, for sake of argument, it's 10% of the total traffic. Now what does that traffic cost, and how much more money could the companies who have inefficient sites make if they were optimised properly and therefore running faster. That figure is probably a lot of money. My thought was there might be some way of tackling that large problem as a whole in some nice automated way and take a cut of the money somehow. A green business idea. Probably silly.

Thank to HN, I've now got a bunch of design sites I visit several times a week. I've always been surprised by the number of ads they have as well as the annoying way they're done. Very odd to have design sites doing something so tasteless and obnoxious.

I don't actually see the ads. I think most people just tend to ignore them.

It`s just funny how SM has a huuuge following and the main way they want to monetize the traffic is through Ads. Is that really the answer to making money on the internet these days? I`m really tired of seeing great sites and startups, fail at the basic principle = making money. There`s so many ways to develop a product or service for your audience that already enjoys your content and comes back for more, it`s not even funny.

btw. I think Smashing Magazine pumps out great content and is consistent in doing so.

Tut+ of Envato does a great job on this. Like SM, they also give out free tutorials, but they go a lot more technical and not limited to designing. They also have a premium section of their site which does quite well according to Collis Taeed (sp?).

http://tutsplus.com/

Great example, I actually subscribe to Net Tuts+ and think that Collis and Vahid really hit the niche of how-to type website spot on by building the Envato networks.

What would you pay a month to have access to SM?

It think anywhere from 4$ to 7$ a month with deals on yearly subs.

With expectations of less link bait style articles and more hands on content.

I can't see how they could provide any value above anyone else in the market. The moment one site is willing to fund themselves purely on adverts is the moment that subs based sites all start to crumble.

As a developer I use sites like SM every so often when it's quicker for me to look something up than to figure it out myself (when time or cost are more important than my pride). I'd never ever consider paying directly for that info (time and cost then swing back under pride) unless someone smarter than me was available to live answer questions, which will never happen.

Your almost better off writing a book than running a subscriptions based service, easier for people to justify than a collection of articles.

i thinks this is exactly why an application like Instapaper is so successful.

I laughed too.

A veritable SEA of ads like that is sadly not that uncommon these days...

There's a fortune to be made in selling high-quality, in-depth content.

There's a dwindling few pennies left in the ad business.

Moreover, the more people try to "monetize" and grab those few pennies - the fewer pennies there are. The more advertising, the less effective.

On the other hand, the more people wise up and charge for great content, the more people will be used to paying.

The rule is this: Always do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. There will always be a backlash - and you want to catch it as it just starts.

Sure, it is a sad story indeed, but does this story really belong on HN?

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