What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum?

Jeremiah Owyang in his blog, asks the following question: "What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum? ". The answer is that it has to be handled well, not covered up or removed.

I have always believe that a customer complaint can be a huge opportunity if handled well.

You routinely buy something from (say) a web site and next day it turns up regular as clockwork. Then something goes wrong. If handled badly you will never go back to that store. If handled really well you will not only go back, but you will tell your friends about it. Why? Because now you know that if something goes wrong in the future these guys will deal with it. It has actually made you happier because before you maybe always had a nagging doubt.

Of course repeated mistakes or mistakes on the first order cannot be recovered from. You just plain need to get your act together.

Firefox myths

Firefox has been incredibly successful in digging into Microsoft's market share. But many believe every thing they hear that's bad about Microsoft and everything they hear thats good about Firefox. I know a few people who are like that about the USA. This site is devoted to expolding those Firefox myths.

Most common passwords

Someone has figured out the ten most common passwords. How? I thought they were supposed to be secret. Maybe the ten most common among people who will tell you there password if you ask. Who knows.

Anyway - few surprises. After '123' and 'password' the third was 'liverpool'. Number 9 was 'arsenal'. So if you want to guess a password try some football teams.

Great idea or pyramid scheme?

You may have got a mail from someone in 'the contactthem' network. It is nicely worded and invites you to make up to $4,800/month (c £2500)to place an ad on your web site.

It turns out that this is not pay per click but an affiliate marketing scheme. You get a commisssion on sales made by people who click on the ad. My experience of such schemes is that you rarely make that sort of money from them. Simple math.

The merchant is selling something for say £20 and you get 5% commission. Assuming a very generous 10% conversion rate and a very generous 10% click through rate and you can easily see that you need 250,000 visitors to generate that much money. So they only work for very high traffic sites.

So how can they make such claims? The answer is pyramid selling. Some of the ads are for the contactthem scheme and you get a percentage of any income from affiliates recruited via that link.

Will it work as advertised? You be the judge.

Useability

Jabob Nielsen's regular useability column is always an interesting read. I like the analogy he gives for his number one rule - stick to standard checkboxes, radio buttons and so on.

"If you change the appearance or behavior of these units, it's like suddenly injecting foreign words into a natural-language communication. Det vil gøre læserne forvirrede (or, to revert to English: Doing so will confuse readers). "

I have noticed (like Neilsen) that the most common victim is the humble scrollbar. I have no idea why, but every designer seems to think that scrollbars are really ugly and need reworking. Neilsen observes that these "almost always cause users to overlook some of their options."

He continues:
"If Jakob's Law is "users spend most of their time on other websites," then Jakob's Second Law is even more critical: "Users have several thousand times more experience with standard GUI controls than with any individual new design." "