Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Presenting Content

Content is king. Content is certainly king if your business model is to publish content on the Web and make money from advertising with traffic drawn by the content. Your first rule should be: don’t “dis” the king. In other words, don’t do anything to distract from the content, make it harder for surfers to find content they need, or make the graphics that frame the content too jazzy. In particular, if the graphics seem too important, they will distract from the content.

Warning

A particularly annoying sin on content-based websites is the use of an animated splash page (such as Flash) to open the site. If you do use an animation to open your site, users should easily be able to bypass it if they desire. At the same time, you should work to keep unnecessary navigation down. In other words, don’t make people click an extra link to get to a destination (unless the extra click is a well-thought-out part of the user experience).

Page and Site Design

These rules of content presentation can be positive (rather than negative):

It should be obvious that the purpose of the site is to clearly present content

Choose a name for the site, and titles and headers for the pages, that make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the site is to present content, and (as a general matter) what that content is.

The design of the site should serve the purpose of presenting content

Site design should be intended to facilitate navigation and frame the content—nothing more and nothing less.

Specific ...