If you’re reading this, then you probably like blogs and list sites. But even though they provide a source of information and entertainment in one, there’s quite a few things that many of them do that are just irritating and often off putting.
Cracking Ace does its best to avoid these terrible habits because we know how awful they are.
One Page Per List Entry
The set up of lists, is usually Top Tens and such. You click the link expecting to see ten items in a list. When this happens: great!
However, some sites like to do the incredibly annoying one item per page.
You read the first section, which is usually an image and one or two short paragraphs about it, then have to click ‘next’ for the next one. So for every item in the list, you have to click and wait for the next page to load up. If for some reason you want to check one of the previous entries, you have to click back again and wait for the thing you already saw load before to load again.
It’s like they don’t realise that online you can’t run out of room on the page! That scroll bar on the side there? Yeah, that saves you from opening a new page!
You don’t have to squeeze it into one screen. It’s not a book!
I know why they do it. It’s for page views. It’s greed.
Instead of looking after the readers and making it easy for them, they would rather their stats go from one view to ten. You’ve read one article, but they have had ten page views from you. Well, not me! I click off as soon as I see that stupid ‘Next’ button. I won’t be a part of these uncaring writers money grubbing games.
Some sites might split an article in half, so if it’s a top ten, they’ll have page one with 5 items and page two with the next five.
This is less offensive, but should be saved for when the lists have long descriptions.
If the list is little more than a pic and a name, just put it all in one place!
You’ll get your hits if your stuff is worth reading.
‘Click Here To Read The Full Thing’ When There Is Nothing Else On Page
This is even worse that the one item per page. This is a page dedicated to nothing but the frickin’ title!
Usually you’ll be in a contents list of articles when you find a title you like the sound of. You click it, hoping to see a full thing. You are presented with a page showing just that same line. Sometimes you are lucky enough to get the first couple of lines of the piece, just to whet your appetite a bit more before you actually get to see the thing you already clicked on once.
It makes you wonder how many more times you are going to need to click before you actually get to see the full thing. At this stage I decide the gamble isn’t worth it and move on.
Slideshows Without Captions/Names/Any Info At All
Some sites like galleries. They dispense with articles and lists and simply shove on a bunch of pretty pictures. The only clue to the connection is the gallery title.
Say, for example, their gallery collection is something like ‘World’s Coolest Animals’. They might just have a selection of cool looking animal pics. (Often done one pic per page grr…)
What they will be missing will be basic stuff like… what the hell the animal is or why it’s cool. Let alone where it’s from, it’s dietary habits, it’s size and weight and so on.
If you’re going to do a gallery, we don’t need extensive info. It is a picture collection after all. But come on, a tiny bit of clarification please!
Opinion Delivered As Fact
There’s far too much misinformation on the internet. Poorly researched stuff, spin, plain lies.
It doesn’t need people who have opinions to be going about saying stuff as though it’s absolute truth. Mainly because a lot of readers want a summary of the facts so that they don’t have to do the research themselves. If they did the research, they wouldn’t need the summary articles. So if they read something as fact when it isn’t, that’s just increasing the amount of misinformation floating about.
Rare Images
Some sites claim to have ‘rare images’ that you won’t find anywhere else. If you can’t see through this lie, you must be mad.
Anything on the internet is not rare. It’s available on every machine connected to the web and up for being saved, copied and uploaded on countless other sites. It’s the absolute opposite of rare. Don’t buy into the hype.
Exciting Title, No Exciting Content
Another trick some sites use to draw in the hits is to put up a thrown together article referencing something exciting about something people want to know about but without having any facts of interest to actually include yet. The title might be something like: “Secrets Revealed About Your Favourite Show”.
The article will reveal no secrets. It might speculate about things, but all it really tells you is that your favourite shows next episode will have some sort of twist in it. One that they are not privy too and will have to wait just as long as you to find out.
Best/Worst Ever
So many writers use this lazy hype building title. It’s so unoriginal.. heaps of sites do it and to start with it’s an overused Simpsons quote anyway!
The worst thing about it though, is that it’s usually a lie or at least.. opinion masquerading as fact.
Other variants include ‘best of all time’ etc. As well as it merely being an opinion, often the idea of something like say ‘best movies of all time’ is ridiculous. Movies have only been around just over a century. ‘Of all time’ is unnecessary as a good few millenia don’t count anyway!
All sorts of wrong.. or Worst Title Ever.
