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Sometimes on my adventure around the internet i encounter things which remind me how “mindless” computers are. Often it is a CMS generated page that has nowhere to go next in a resonable place and annoying things like that.
I have found in the last h months i have seen less and less of this, but this evening while i was looking up how to set up my VPS server, i saw this beaty of an ad manaagment page.
This has been caused by an admanagement system which does not know enough metadata (data about data) about the advert it has been tasked with placing. This is not that uncommon, but it took my attension today as i have been thinking about this sort of thing recently.
The advert placement, and choice has severely damaged the accsessibility of the page. both visually and in the code.
The colors of the adverts, and the animation on the page make it very hard to read the pages content. And this is just the start of the issues with the advert placement. In Technical issues this advert in the middle of the page is not “contant” and thus is presentation and should not belong in the main content area. or should not be included into the structure of the document
I think it shows on the screenshot that the adverts are all form the same series in the campaigners campaign.
I have been experimenting with Microformats on both the publishing and parseing side and they have started to open my eyes to the way complicated data can be simplified with an agreed way of adding metadata.
I have been developing an advertisement rotation system recently, and this has highlighted the fact i need data about who the advert is for and what series of adverts it is from.
What can we do?
Thinking about the problem i can think of two items of data which organise the adverts better. this meta data is very simple.
the first, the clients name, the secound the series from whaich the adverts has been taken.
This would make the managment sytem aware of the cleints and client “seiries” on the page. so if a client has two adverts on the page, then they are two different adverts, not three identical adverts from a campain.
What other Benifits are there
other benifits include the ability to mesure the number of advert shows a client has had, and provide a more detailed break down of which type, and from which campaign.
how this could be implimeented is likley to be the subject of another post,
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