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Your Site Map: Spider Food Or Just A Light Snack?
Mechanical spiders have to eat. In fact, they usually have bigger appetites than the real-life spiders you squish under your shoe. What spiders am I talking about? The automated programs sent out by search engines to review and index websites. These...
HTML Editors 101 - Smaller Is Better
Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia's Dreamweaver aren't the only HTML editors on the market. In fact, niche HTML editors from various independent developer offer a number of advantages over the big boys. SiteSpinner SiteSpinner is a user-friendly...
The Top 5 Roadblocks To Web Accessibility
Introduction
Accessibility is often the last thing on a web designer's mind when creating a website. This is not a trait unique to newbies or people working on a personal page. It is also a trait common to professional web designers (large...
Showing and Hiding HTML elements using Layers
A long time back I visited a site that had a very fancy, animated navigation bar. Now, as a professional web developer, I'm not in favor of DHTML-supported, fancy navigation bars, but it was very fascinating. What they had done was, whenever you...
Cross Browser Compatibility
There are literally hundreds of web browsers in use around the
world. All of them implement the W3C document standards a little
differently. Web designers must wrestle with these differences
to make a web site work. This article discusses the...
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Popup: Hate 'em or Love 'em
You are browsing a favorite website when a popup window appears.
You close the window to continue browsing, and another popup
appears. Later on, you realize that several windows have opened
because of these popups. Annoying, isn't it?
Popup windows are another type of online advertising on the
internet. Its purposes include increasing website traffic, which
is the number of people who visit a particular website; and to
capture email addresses without any prior knowledge from the
person who is browsing the website.
Advertising supported websites make up the large chunk of popup
users. These websites previously used banner advertisements
(banner ads, these are the advertisements on top of a browser
window) to generate huge profits.
They take advantage of internet users who have less experience
in dealing with internet advertisements by offering gifts or
items that go with any particular purchase. Unaware users bite
into the bait, and before they know it, they are also being
charged for the "gift" that went with their purchased item.
As customer interest in banner advertising decreased, many
internet-based vendors began to think of developing more
effective advertising methods. By then, popup advertisements
started annoying many internet users.
Popup windows are the windows which appear when website browsers
open a new web browser to display various contents such as
advertisement for product subscription, opinion surveys, and
free download.
This window is often times generated by Javascript, but can also
be generated by other means. Some of the new popups are created
using Flash which contains animations, while others are created
using DHTML, so the popup appears before the browser screen.
Many internet advertisers love popup ads because of their
nature. Popups are hard to ignore as they appear first before
the main browser window. This characteristic makes it even
better than the previous stationary
banner advertisements.
Popups are also loved for their high clickability rate as more
people click on them because of their ability to tickle the
interest of internet users. It is also shown by recent studies
that the click-rate of popup ads is twice as that of the banner
ads. Between January and September 2002, the number of popups
increased from 1.2 billion to 4.9 billion.
Among the top users of popup ads are websites promoting
pornography and violence. Not only do these popups advertise
adult content, they also set off multiple windows.
As the user closes a window, a another window appears,
initiating another set of windows, and sometimes this happens
indefinitely. Users call this "java trap", or "spam cascade".
There are, however, processes which can produce popup windows
such as spyware programs.
"Mousetrapping", a variation of the popup, fills the whole
screen with its content, removing the menu bars and other
features which allows the user to close the window.
Another variation is called the pop-under advertisement wherein
a new browser window is opened behind the active window.
Pop-unders are less annoying to a user, but are only seen when
the main browser window is closed, making it difficult to find
out which website opened them.
Recently, however, many internet users have expressed their
annoyance over the massive number of popup windows they
encounter while browsing.
As a response, more companies have reduced or removed popups
from their websites, and internet browsers such as Microsoft
Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, America Online, Camino,
Opera, and Safari, are providing features to block popups.
Additional programs to block popups and spyware are also
available.
About the author:
James Monahan is the owner and Senior Editor of PopupDepot.com and writes
expert articles about popups.
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