Web Designers and their Blogs

Fellow blogger and friend, Jonathan Ng of Beyond Simplicity (though might be switching to a simpler domain) has written a short review of Blogs Malaysia and started a rather interesting discussion in his entry, Web Designers and Blogs.

Firstly, thanks for promoting me and Stanch for the work done on the new metablog or blog network. I didn’t do much work since Stanch was in control of development. And it’s common that when you’re developing a website, you just can’t the sight of either border-ed DIVs or colored in a solid background.

Anyway, the part that sparked interest in Jonathan’s topic was if ads and a web designer’s blog should gel together.

I quote Jonathan directly,

Take Danny’s “Websites Made Simple” for example. It’s filled with ads, even amongst page content. Perhaps some would say that it’s comparable with porn and mp3 download sites (minus the naked ladies and flashing smilies). In my opinion, there were just a tad too many ads, and the Google text ads were not distinguished enough from the rest of the page.

If Danny’s blog was to be solely treated as a profit-oriented blog, I’d understand the ads and the default template. Heck, I didn’t even realize there were that many ads until I visited his site in Opera as AdBlock in Firefox removed all the ads. But what kind of impact would it have on potential clients?

His honest opinion made me think that whether I should minimize the number of ads down (currently it’s three) or have them more clearly presented or even just remove them. I’d go with the first opinion because ads optimization is to actually blend them in with the content. It’s not cheating, just call it a type of marketing. Trust me, I’ve been there about this so I understand you, Jon.

Jon really made me think that with this number of ads, will my blog still be as professional or will I still look as a professional? As far as I know (AFAIK), there are many other prominent web designers and developers around who do the same but the opinion I’d like to make here is;

Should ads may be even in blogs belonging to your business?

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