It’s so easy to miss. It’s right there in front of you, you see it every day, but you just don’t notice it. These things are why we need a second set of eyes to look at things for us.
I recently had a question from a reader who was interested in how they might get a sponsored post. I though this to be a strange question since I’ve put a rather large button in my sidebar explicitly for that purpose. I began to ask myself, how could this person have missed that? Then I realised my mistake. I chose a blue background for the PPP Direct badge when they first came out. My thinking was it will blend in nicely with my layout, and it did. Therein lay the problem.
I didn’t truly want the badge to blend in, despite the fact that I thought I did. What I really wanted was for people to see the badge, check it out and consider the opportunity.
I’ve now changed the badge to red and I think you’ll agree there’s no missing it now. The common mistakes are common for a reason. Always double check what yo’re doing, or better yet, get another person to double check what you’re doing 
They’re far more likely to see what you missed.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 mike // Aug 16, 2007 at 1:35 pm
It’s actually really easy to miss - I require tinyurl to show me a preview before it takes me somewhere, which is something *everyone* should do.
Making your image source be a tinyurl URL (I see src=”http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?num=33oz3f”) means I won’t ever see that image unless I go out of my way to do so. I do see the Alt text, but it doesn’t stand out nearly as much.
Obviously I’m not your target market, but hopefully there are more security conscious people out there.
2 Marc // Aug 17, 2007 at 12:14 pm
That’s an excellent point Mike. While you certainly would fall under that group of people I would not consider that ad’s primary audience, that’s still really good to know.
3 mike // Aug 19, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I like to help when I can.