History lesson: On October 22, 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Highway Beautification Act into law. The law put limits on outdoor advertising along the US highway system and generally promotes “scenic enhancement and roadside development.” –– Today I’m proposing that we, the makers of the internet, (Go ahead, make your stupid Al Gore jokes from 10 years ago. I’ll wait……hahaha remember when that guy was running for president? It’s a good thing he didn’t win or… bad… things…. might…. have…… oh never mind) set forth to put a similar plan into action of the internet¹ to promote “scenic enhancement.” So what does this mean? Well let’s get all official about it: § 1 – Ad placement should be logical and not overwhelm the content your site is providing If you want a TV-style ad, do one of those “while your page is loading” ads that everyone clicks through, because there’s always a “skip this ad” button at the top. Those are way less annoying than: pop-ups, those link ads that pop up a window when you mouse over them, pop-unders, and a frame of animated gifs or flash banners all rotating out of sync around your content. And let’s be honest, how much money are these annoying ads making you anyway? CPM on most internet display advertising is crap, unless your the New York Times site. So why not ditch it all together and find some other way to cover your $200/yr server costs? §2 – Gimmicks are so 1996, don’t make them the focus of your site. You have this great idea for the website for your local pizza restaurant. You’re going to make a site where everyone can upload videos, and feature them on the site, oh and I guess we’ll put up the menu too somewhere. Oh yeah, and maybe we should put the address up there somewhere to, BUT THE VIDEOS! …I get it. You want to be the next youTube star or something, but guess what. I didn’t come to your website to watch wacky videos about some dude who’s gonna take a cell phone video of his junk and post it to your site just to see it make the homepage. I came to your site to find out how I could get a pizza. If you want to do wacky customer videos I’m all for it. Just make sure that I can find out what you sell and how I can buy it without your gimmick getting in my way, because if I can’t what’s the point? You’re wasting both our time. I just wanted a pizza and instead you gave me youTube. §3 – No flashing text anywhere. Even if you’re a strobe light company. I don’t have to explain this one do I? No one gets to use the <blink> tag anymore. EVER. §4 – If you must do a take over ad, mute the sound and make it easy to close. This one is very simple. 1) If I go to your site and an ad takes over and starts talking to me or making any noise at all without me telling it to, I’m going to close the window (or tab) and never come back. Ever again. 2) Make the stupid things easy to close because that’s what everyone it going to do immediately anyway. Don’t piss them off by making it hard. I’m sure there are more sections we could add to make our internet a more beautiful place, but why should I have to do all the work? This is the internet people. We should add this to wikipedia and then all take turns adding things to it! Let’s all do our part to promote “scenic enhancement” of our internet. Afterall, it’s the only one we’ve got ². ¹ Remember when it was called the Information Superhighway and not “the web”? ² Until some scientists build a new one.
