Web page context, and a notice on each post
I made the mistake of posting about Lil Romeo and Bow Wow a couple of weeks ago. Within a few hours of adding the comments feature I had three comments, including one each from Bow Wow’s fantasy girlfriend and Lil Romeo’s future wife hopeful.
Now I always pictured my readers as 25+ adults. Not 14-year-old children. But part of the magic of the Internet is the ability to stumble across a site from anywhere and come to any page entirely removed from its context. I’m quite sure it doesn’t help that my site has a 6th grade-ish pink stars theme (I had old school roller rinks in mind when I came up with it).
I always assumed that it was obvious to people that a page was part of a larger site. Each page has links to previous and next posts. Each page has a global navigation header. But if the Romeo/Bow wow entry was all you saw, I can see how you might assume I was a 16 year old girl, or that this was a celebrity-worshipping site.
The problem with not having enough context, as I’m starting to understand, is that visitors (particularly new or infrequent ones) may define your entire site by a single page. For example, interracial personals sites contacted me a half-dozen times about advertising on Blackfeminism.org based on exactly two posts about pop culture depictions of interracial relationships. I also received hate mail about those two pages. And that’s two pages out of over 400 posts hundred posts. Again: not enough context.
In an attempt to give visitors some context, I added a simple message to each post. You will now notice three short paragraphs on the right side of each page.
This page is part of a web log (or blog) written by Tiffany B. Brown.
I write about web design and development with frequent forays into pop culture, internet life, politics, travel and personal stuff.
You can find the latest entry on my home page.
I’m sure some folks won’t care about a page’s context, even if it’s there. And I’m just as sure that some others will miss it entirely. Still, I think it’s helpful information to have. My hope is that it will prompt people to think before they type something that is off-base, off-topic or out-of-context.
Have you noticed or experienced this problem with context? How have you managed it or designed around it?
Technorati-ism: usability, web design
yes i have experienced this as well. you can do some things (as you are) to ward some of it off, but really i don’t think there’s a way to prevent it, just like you can’t prevent email spam from happening either. there are just too many people out there committed to inanity.
I think that the about link should really serve this purpose, but I guess non-socialized surfers abound. A tagline can help as well and that seems to be what your disclaimer boils down to.
When I first started Did You Know it wasn’t about me at all, but about little factoids that I discovered. Many of which I learned about while working on a history textbook for a high-school textbook publisher. One of my more popular posts (which I’ve sent lost in a Blogger conversion) was about the first African-American men to join the military. Unfortunately sometime after WWII all of their records were “lost” and many people were unable to prove they’d served which meant they couldn’t access veteran’s benefits. While it was available I got about 3-5 emails a month from people asking me if their grandfather or great-grandfather had been in the Army. I had no idea and actually spent quite a bit of time trying to find a source to direct them to. But I never found one. Even after I amended that post to say “I’m not a historian. Merely a curious woman with too much time on her hand. If you want more information, please use a search engine” I still got requests. I regret that I lost the post and the comments, but I’m also glad to no longer have to respond.