Humorous design decision of the day: Color coding titles

We are replacing a couple of spreadsheets with a web application. One set of spreadsheets had data separated/categorized into "orange section" and "green section". These were the background colors of the data in those sections. This data really belonged in a wiki, but that is another story. Anyway, everyone started referring to the data by color: like "Is that the orange data or the green data?" The users did not want to lose the distinction of the colors because now every one refers to the orange data and the green data instead of their proper names (which are pretty ambiguous). To keep the orange and green I made the background colors of the page names orange and green to match the spreadsheet. When we showed these pages to the customers they were very excited that we managed to incorporate their color scheme into the application. Sometimes it is the small things that matter the most to the customer.

Ad Space

I needed a synonym today so I decided to hit up my favorite synonym site: thesaurus.com. I did the search and the result came back and I found a word to replace the one I had. But I had difficulty finding the answer on the page.

The grayed out portions of the image are all ads or whitespace. 78% of the screen is taken up by ads! I didn't even count the popup blocker at the top of the page which was blocking another ad. Some may point out that the content on the left is actually navigation to other words, but these lead to dictionary.com and all cause a popup ad. It is a gray area (pun intended) but I counted it. It constitutes about 15% of the screen so if you want to give it to the content side of the equation you are still talking about 63% in ad space. Worse still is that they break up the useful parts of the page with a huge ad. That little sliver that tells you what you searched for and the actual answer that brought you to the site is separated by an ad that interupts your flow and makes it difficult to actually find the information you are looking for. Making it hard to find the value on your page isn't a good thing.

Having 78% of the screen taken by ads is the equivalent of a one hour television show having 45 minutes of commercials. Google has succeeded as a search engine and done so well as a business because they don't take up that much space with their ads, they don't blink and they are actually relevant. This argument seems late to the game, but obviously service providers are not understanding. Please, if you are going to put ads on your page, make them relevant, give me easy access to your content (which is where the REAL value lies) and don't flash things at your users.