Popups provide us with righteous indignation. And the problem with things that give us righteous indignation is that we overreact. We use napalm on a housefly.

Don’t like spam? How about an email filter that will stop some spam, but will also prevent you from receiving the email newsletters you subscribe to, emails from prospects looking to give you business, and emails from your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend from college who’s in town for the weekend and wants to see you?

Popup blockers work the same way. Yes, it’s nice to know that we’re being protected from the one millionth ad for Orbitz/Travelocity/Expedia/Netflix, or the one billionth ad for an X-10 spy camera. However, some Web developers use popups for completely legitimate purposes. Sometimes it’s for navigational purposes, or it’s a design choice, or it’s a good programming solution, or even it’s promotional, such as a giveaway of steak knives for joining our mailing list.

We recently found out that we were being blocked. We use a popup to create a printer-friendly, dynamically-created affiliation letter that hospitals need to get from one of our clients’ sites. Turns out that a number of people weren’t able to see the popup because they had their popup blockers on by default. AOL users didn’t even get a warning! It just looked like our programming was shoddy.

A better solution, which I believe Safari (the Mac-only browser) offers, is to allow you to block all popups, or just popups from a 3rd party (not from the site itself.) That’s more likely to catch X-10 ads but allow site-centric popups to continue.

However, I can’t convince the whole world to switch. Instead, I’ll need to make sure that going forward we find alternative solutions to the popup. (And for those of you wondering about having a link open in a new window, those days are probably numbered as well.)

Rich Brooks
No Longer Making Popups

Up until late last year flyte licensed a search product from Atomz for our own site and most of our clients’ sites. It was a great product, gave great results, and the licence was free. Unfortunately, Atomz decided that they needed to make a profit. Those bastards.

So what they did–which is unfortunate–is add Google Adwords results to the top of the search results page. So, for example, if someone was at the flyte site and searched on "web design" the first three results would be for our competitors! Not a good outcome for us.

We tried a few different solutions, but we finally settled on a site search we call "Radar." (Get it? Radar? Flyte? Get it?) It provides great results, keeps visitors on your site, and is completely customizable.

If you were using the Atomz search, or are unhappy with your current site search, please talk to flyte about Radar.

If you want to check out Radar for yourself, please visit flyte’s site and give it a test run.

Rich Brooks
Your Site Search Guy