December 2007 Archives

In what I'm going to consider a late Christmas present, AOL/Time Warner has decided to kill off the ailing Netscape web browser. While the recent versions of Netscape didn't cause nearly the amount of headaches as the Netscape of old, it was still one more browser for us to worry about testing in.

According to Netscape Director Tom Drapeau, "While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer".

Forbes.com has more information about the end of Netscape's 13 year battle for browser popularity.

So long Netscape... you had a good run.

This is a post about something that I'd thought had died out but I've started seeing it a lot again lately. Whenever a designer does a new website design, they rarely have copy to work with. So when creating promotional areas on the homepage, in sidebars, etc., you'll inevitably see something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Quisque molestie tristique nulla. Nam porta cursus sapien. Duis ullamcorper porta tortor. Suspendisse vel enim vitae magna lobortis tempor.
Read More

The problem I have with this is the "read more" link at the bottom. Content creators use this template and typically add copy but leave the link unchanged. While it may look aesthetically pleasing to have 4 promo areas with symmetrical "read more" links at the bottom, it's terrible for SEO and for general web accessibility.

It's widely known at this point that search engines use the actual text of a hyperlink as one of the criteria for search engine rankings. Chances are people aren't googling "read more" and hoping to find your website so stop polluting your pages with those links. Instead, make the title of the promo your hyperlink, or at least use descriptive keywords in your link at the bottom.

If you're a designer, stop creating comps with these "read more" links because it encourages a bad practice.

If you're a content writer, start factoring this into your content creation. Whenever you need a link, be sure to include descriptive keywords.

If you're a developer, send this blog post to your designer and content creator team members and let's try to kill the "read more" link once and for all.