Snap is the Animated GIF for sophisticated bloggers. It’s something you tack onto a site to elicit a “ooo, that’s cool”. In-text hover ads like ContentLink and Vibrant Ads are the same, except marginally more obtrusive, less functional, and monetizing. They’re appearing all over the web at an alarming rate not only on small and overambitious blogs, but on popular and oft-trafficked sites: even the site for Matt Mullenweg’s legendary Akismet uses Snap, and many high-profile news blogs (especially tech blogs) are putting up these in-text ads.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons not to inflict these sorts of things on one’s readers, the first among them being, it’s Annoying. This should be the first consideration before implementing an idea on a live site. Perhaps for ads the desire for money wins out over this consideration, but there’s no excuse to put Snap on a site. The bubbles from both of them obscure content on a mouseover, violating one of the most central tenets of good interface design: Mousing over should not initiate a layout-changing action. There’s a reason why in concrete interfaces - The Mac OS, Windows, various Linux desktop environments, as opposed to web interfaces - menus require you to click on them to show their contents. Mousing over is a passive action, and websites with Snap, hover ads, or even dropdown menus that activate with a hover are using this passive action to actively change the layout, something that in most cases requires a conscious and active move of the pointer (or, heaven forbid, even a click) to dismiss. Since passive actions usually elicit no response - at most a change in appearance (like a button that glows under the pointer) - a popup is unexpected, and as loath as I am to use the condescending terminology of interface designers, disconcerting. Normally I give users enough credit not to be disconcerted by something like motion (as critics of the myriad animations of Mac OS X and now Windows Vista occasionally argue, in favor of something more spartan), but when something totally unexpected like a hoverbox ad pops up after moving the pointer across the page, that’s disconcerting even to me.

There are certainly worse offenders, such as the Blackberry Pearl’s expanding banner ads that would slide out unceremoniously into the content that made their way onto Wired News not too long ago, but the backlash against those was immediate and strong enough so as to stamp them into quick disuse. There are of course the perky “Congratulations! You have been selected to receive two free iPod Nanos” ads that blare sound at you when opening the page, but those are mostly relegated to sketchy sites anyway. For these high-profile sites that ostensibly value long-term credibility and respect more than short-term profit but install hovers anyway, the message from readers and users needs to be unequivocally clear: Hoverboxes are a pollution to the internet, and will not be supported.

The new website for Campus Crossroads, a church on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just gone live. From their website:

This site moves the church away from their previous flash-based website hosted at Sitecube, a seller of “designer websites”, to a multi-user Wordpress installation that will hopefully be much easier both for the visitors and the staff to navigate, and much more conducive to frequent updates.