Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.
Links and windows. A discussion.
July 26, 2006 | Posted by: Marty
I find that in a lot of weblogs that I read the most insightful information comes from the discussion in the comments rather than the post itself.
The comments in this post seem like they should prove very insightful. (Read the post too)
Let the links in new window discussion commence!
Tags for this post:
design accessibility
Categorized in: Marketing, Technology
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Comments
by Nicholas
Great idea, Martimus.
I’m a power user (for lack of a less annoying term) of the web, so I’m not exactly the common denominator here, but I don’t like it when sites open browser windows for me. I choose with each click whether to just click and have the link open in that window or right click/control click to make the link open in a new window or new tab.
That’s my personal thought based on my personal browsing preferences. Here’s where I go off the deep end, make assumptions, and make statements not backed up my any empirical research findings:
I’d say that many marketing folks would hold the position that opening links into new windows “keeps the user at my site” when they close that window. These same people proobably hold the position that the only way people should be able to download whitepapers and other valuable resources from their sites is by first filling out a form with all sorts of required fields. They’d be wrong. And this is actually backed up by research (which I cannot find at this time, but I’ll be back!).
My take is that all opening new windows does is annoy and confuse people. For me, at home, I have a slow computer, so when a site opens a new window, it makes my browser chug and half for a few seconds before loading the window. This is a pain.
So, there’s my opinion. Sites that open new windows are a pain. And that’s not even covering the javascript-powered new windows that change position and size. Oh boy! Don’t get me started. Don’t even get me started!