So do you think it's a good idea to have something on your site that people hate? I can guarantee that they not only hate the pop-ups, but almost instantly hate your site, hate you, and probably aren't crazy about your car, house and dog.

The whole idea behind pop-ups was to put something in front of visitors that you want them to see, know about or buy. Well, if all people want to do is close every pop-up they see on your site, then your purpose for using them is moot. You not only won't sell anything you advertise in a pop-up, but you won't sell anything on your site because people will be fleeing in droves.

There's another little item that you should know about the pop-ups on your site. Visitors probably aren't even seeing them. The peasants have revolted, and pop-up blockers are more prevalent on the net than political mailings at election time. I haven't seen a pop-up in over two years.

Pop-up blockers come in many forms. More and more browsers have built in blockers. I've been using Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) as a browser, and the built in pop-up blocker works great. And Mozilla is free. Another free blocker comes from Google (http:/ oolbar.google.com). This is a little toolbar that will be added to whatever browser you have. It blocks pop-ups, contains no spyware and lets you do Google searches from wherever you are on the net.

So as you see, pop-ups will make your visitors angry with you, unless they've taken matters into their own hands with one of the many blockers, in which case they will never see them. So should you abandon the use of pop-ups? Not really.

The pop-ups I've been talking about are the involuntary ones. The visitor has no control over them. But what about voluntary pop-ups? You know, you click on a small picture and a window opens up with a larger image of that picture. Or you click on a word or service and a window opens up explaining the word or service. Now, you're dealing with something that visitors absolutely love. You have given them back the control they want, and removed the annoyance they hate. It makes using your site easy, your site is more informative and visitors will stay longer.

When designing these voluntary pop-up windows be sure to make them a convenient size, so they don't take over the whole screen, and make them easy to close. You can have text, or a button, in the window that lets people close it, or they can use the X on the top right of the window. Again, you want to give visitors easy control over how they interact with your site.

Replace your pop-ups, or planned pop-ups, with page design that will guide your visitors to where you want them to go. Giving your visitors a pleasant experience on your site is an incentive to stay longer and come back often, which is what you want.

http://www.CreativeCauldron.com Jeff Colburn is a website designer and writer. His goal is to make the process of creating or updating your website easy and simple for you, while creating a website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff can also create all of the copy for your website.

To see a sample of Jeff's work go to The Creative Cauldron. It's an award winning site filled with information for writers, photographers, artists and other creative people.

Copyright 2004 Jeff Colburn

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