Lessons From Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen

OUT OF MY GORD -- July 13 -- Jakob Nielsen is a "controversial guru of Web design." Here are his feelings about the evolution of the search interface. The big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. People are basically lazy and want to expend minimal effort. Banners don't work. People exhibit 'banner blindness,' which also causes them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well. FULL ARTICLE @ OUT OF MY GORD

Mark Brooks: In short, focus on text ads. Social networks generally have terrible click through rates from banners.