On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Ken Schafer wrote: > links, but it is entirely the choice of visitors to these sites to decide if > THEY want to act.
> I'm not sure I'm ready to judge the behavior of the "average user" by ANY of > our behaviours as the fact we are participating in this conversation means I > can guarantee you we are NOT average Internet users. You are, however, judging their behavior by your own, by assuming it will be by their choice. You are assuming they know that as soon as they click this, their browser settings will be changed, when as the person getting the support calls I can tell you users are often completely clueless as to why it has changed. A frequent answer is they expected instructions or a description of what a home page is. You and I know what it will do. The average user has no indication that this will make a permanent change on their computer. (Which is why, it looks like Firefox and IE7 have disabled it entirely. IE6 popups up a dialog that, apparently, users still manage to miss). While Google may return millions of pages with such a link -- oddly Google isn't one of them, nor Yahoo, or the BBC or even MSN or Microsoft -- pages someone is likely to actually want to have as their home page. They link to instructions on how to change your own browser settings. It's a dangerous option to give, and in the end it is just one thing that adds to the seedy look. > bothers me a LITTLE that you and your wife thought it was a scam page in that > it may mean that the value to you is diminished and the odds of you trusting > the links and clicking through is therefore lower. > If you are saying that our parked pages ARE scams, I would strongly disagree. I think you have two problems: The look, and a real risk of a false advertising claim. The basic problem is it tries to look like a 'real' (for lack of a better term) web site of a real company: Name at the, slogan, a left menu that might be products they sell. The banner saying the domain is not in use is outside the layout, in a space normally associated with advertising banners, so the user's eye train skips it and jumps right to the main page. Typical call we get from a user would be the web site they always go to isn't working. They've miss-typed the domain and their eye did exactly what I described above. They now think it's a redesign of their intended site and start trying to find what they need. Frustration and support call follows. My wife mentioned another red flag, the over-used generic corporate photos. Or, as she put it, "Why does a safety card site look like an airline boardroom ? What does that have to do with safety ?" There is a third problem of simple guilt by association: It looks like a scammer page because it's a design used in specific spam runs. Now, maybe the spammers just use the same parked page company, but after a certain point it doesn't matter, if it's the best design in the world it can be tainted by association. (Of course, I think it's a cheesy looking design anyway, but that' opinion :-) Contrast this with a page I saw from Godaddy earlier today (and didn't bookmark, sorry). The Godaddy logo was in the page design, and it explicitly said that the site did not exist but here were other things you might like. Godaddy's design may have fewer click-throughs, but I would say the increase in your design isn't because it's better, but because it doesn't say it's an error page. NOW you start to open yourselves to false advertising charges. One could easily claim an attempt to deceive because the page attempts to mimic a corporate look when it fact it is just advertising. I had asked about the "Most Popular Tags", and being told it's proprietary scares me from wanting my company name anywhere near this page. You are using a phrase with a specific association with online communities. Either these are "Tags" in the common sense, which are "popular" by the "most" people which should have made the answer simple, or they aren't and it's false advertising. Next are we going to argue over what "is" means ? Look at the other headings: Best Links -- who says ? Recent Topics -- where? Is there a discussion group here I've missed ? Recommended links -- who recommends them, and who stands by that recommendation ? If someone takes their recommendation for Osha Electrical Safety, and gets electrocuted, are they going to sue the reseller, or Tucows, or your ad provider ? My lawyer would kill me if I let someone else put recommendations on a page that has my name at the top, without some serious disclaimer. Unless you can show where those Topics were in fact the most recent, I think you have a real risk of some AG claiming deceptive practices for implying a community exists where there isn't one. At the very least, these are the sorts of vague claims that are classic signs of a scam, and are the very things we tell people to watch out for. My kids were just watching a PBS show "Word Girl" around the whole concept of "vague". The bad guy sells "The Thing" that does "stuff". This page looks like it was designed to teach kids how to spot a scam. ========================================================== Chris Candreva -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- (914) 948-3162 WestNet Internet Services of Westchester http://www.westnet.com/ _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
