Warmest Greetings,

The Continuing Saga of the Boring Text Link  

:: Friday, August 19, 2005 ::

While gobs of you are wondering which automatic link software device is going to make you rich and famous, others fret over the labels of links themselves. And their scent, for example. Who knew a link had one?

There's a great example piece on the importance of link labels and conversions in UIE's new blog called UIE Brain Sparks. This is where Jared Spool lets his hair down, finally, and we get to know Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development and Christine Perfetti, Director of Business Strategy & Planning too. Their brand new baby blog has an entry from August 15, written by Jared, called Lateral Movement at the NY Times.

Because of search engines and content aggregators, people are visiting fewer pages. The drive to content has become more surgical and visitors are employing a “get in and get out, nobody gets hurt” approach.

For the NY Times, that means that the people coming from the RSS feed or email alerts are probably only reading those articles they click on and not exploring the rest of the site. Bad news for advertising revenues."

He goes on to talk about lateral links and how a boring, generic link label may not inspire or "trigger" a click. The example he uses, from the New York Times, illustrates the problem really well. We all have seen, or used words like "Previous" and "Next". His illustration shows how weak this practice can be and why.

He also points out that web pages are designed as if everyone has landed on a page from another page from within the site. But, what happens if the page is a landing page from an email, ad, or RSS feed? In these cases, folks are often thrown out the window with no net to catch them, or at the very least, a tour guide.

The post is just one of the many gems from this new blog. It's intended to inform and teach by example. Case in point, the way they instruct visitors on how to get notifications via their RSS feed. If you subscribe to the UIE newsletter, you'll see some redundant content, but if you crave this sort of stuff, the posts in between newsletter runs ought to keep you happy.

Update on Cre8asiteForums Server Move

Friday, for some of you, is ending and we were open for biz all day despite our alert. There's actually more prep work going on as I write. So even though it doesn't like anything is happening, there really is. Will let you know if anything exciting happens.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 8/19/2005 05:40:00 PM

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