There are also wayyyy more ads on this blog.

Online ads really bother some people.  They ruin the user experience and drive some people to using ad blockers.  I don’t think it has to be that way. I think don’t think of ads as a necessary necessary evil.  They’re a challenge.  We can create great ads that fill the side of a building, a page of a magazine, a bottlecap, a stamp.  Why not try to make online ads interesting? Where’s the next great 125×125 designer?

How can we make ads more useful for our users?  I’m not sure, but I’m playing around with ads on Enter Venture.  It has nothing to do with money because, well, there’s not yet enough to support my monthly coffee bill.  Instead, I’m adding ads to Enter Venture to figure ads out.  Here’s what I mean:

1. Designing with constraints

When you mock up a site, it’s easy to think about where you’ll place all of the top comment, category, and media goodies.  With ads, though, you have to figure out what you’re willing to sacrifice and where.  To make ads work, you certainly can’t hide them.  Ads teach you to organize with constraints.

2. Learn the lingo

CPC, CPM, and CPA are just the start of it.  You’ll want to get an idea for what a leader board is, why and when to use an ad network, and how to measure your success.  When you become big enough to sell your own ads, you’ll be glad to have made your mistakes early.

3. Understand your options

Ads are a bit like tattoos (or so I hear).  Once you’ve got one, you want another one.  Once you’ve got a single ad on your site, you’re going to start thinking about how to extract more revenue for less space.  You learn the difference between getting search ads from Chitika, affiliate revenue from Amazon, and direct ads from AdSense.  Your feed is all of a sudden ripe for the picking.  It’s not all banner ads and pop ups — know your options.

4.  A business or hobby?

Putting ads on your site will quickly tell you if you’re running a business or not.  Are you getting any closer to exceeding your blog’s expenses with your ad revenue?  How about paying yourself a salary?  No?  Yes? If not, blogging is your hobby.  (It’s my hobby).

5. Level of Tolerance

I feel similarly about learning advertising as a I do about learning to invest.  With just a little bit of real money, you change your mindset and learn things you just can’t simulate otherwise.  What’re you willing to do for ad revenue?  Are you going to write paid reviews?  Are there products you will not refer?  During the Prop 8 campaign, I saw a lot of “Yes on Prop 8″ ads online.  I definitely would have blocked that — just doesn’t meet my tolerance level.

6. Make it useful

There’s nothing advertised on Enter Venture that isn’t related to Enter Venture readers.  In fact, there’s nothing advertised that I don’t use myself.  I use both Highrise and InMotion hosting, and well, if Google wants to send people to GoBigNetwork, Business.com, and somewhere else to “Find Venture Capital”, I think that supports this blog too.

There it is.  Six reasons to add ads to your blog that have nothing to do with money.  The SEVENTH reason, though, that has everything to do with money.  It’s a recession, after all.  How else am I going to take care of that monthly coffee bill?

In plain English, Crazy Egg shows you how your visitors use your site. Where are they clicking?

Crazy Egg offers 5 free tests of their service so I recently started a month long Crazy Egg test. Soon after I began, I wrote about the wpSearch plugin for WordPress. Crazy Egg tells me that people actually read this blog and try some of these things out. That’s good to know. It also tells me people tend to click the “Enter” in “Enter Venture” because it looks like a button. The other major button, the LinkedIn button, is second only to the search bar in number of clicks.  It even tells me I need to do something about that subscribe button…

Rather than explain any more though, just check out Crazy Egg’s results for Enter Venture. The images (and free trials) speak for themselves:

The Heat View - The heat view shows you a rough focal point for a user’s eye for popular areas.

The Confetti View — This is great for figuring out exactly where your users clicked. Notice, most of my users do not click Search. They must key it.

Statistics Overlay - This view gives you both the number of clicks and the exact element that is actioned with those clicks.

The different views do overlap a bit with their function, but so be it. They look cool in the process. I’ve been thinking about experimenting with advertisements on Enter Venture at some point. Crazy Egg’s $9/month (after a few more free trials) would likely be money well spent to help maximize those advertisements.

You might know you want to start a website, but it’s tempting to imagine your site 3 years down the line, rather than the first 3 months from now. I think this is something you’re seeing with a lot of social networks these days. It’s a way to make a successful business, but not all that distinguishing. We’ll call this the ‘zero to facebook’ method. Remember kids, Facebook started out as a simple friend connection and photo sharing site.

It’s probably been said to death that you should focus on that one, core idea. Become the leader in something. Well, how do you get there? I’m not sure I have an exact framework for finding the right idea, but I’ll offer a completely unrelated story to that point. I think there’s a message in here somewhere…

In high school, I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the great, growing sports in the U.S. — lacrosse. I had played ice hockey throughout my childhood with some football, soccer, and baseball mixed in, but I had barely ever seen a lacrosse game. The ones I had seen were limited to rowdy, indoor box lacrosse games in whatever now-defunct league the Boston Blazers played in.

(Digression from my digression: These Blazers games were insane. I once saw a goalie, after the teams were pelted by debris for the remaining minutes of the game, pick up a squashed beer can with his stick and hurl the can back into the stands where it would have knocked out a heckler if not for a small railing between the can and his face. You could hear the ‘ping’ throughout the old Garden.)

Anyways, when I began playing lacrosse, I started with a blank slate and little understanding of the game’s rules, techniques, positions, or formations. My lacrosse coaches throughout my high school years taught me most of what I would learn about how to play the game over the four years that I played there.

One thing I learned about lacrosse is that there’s a position called ‘attack’. How cool is that? Attack only play offense (again, how cool is that?). In lacrosse, you have to have a certain number of players on each side of the field at one time. This keeps the defensemen in the defensive zone and the attack in the offensive zone.

When an attack ended up on the defensive zone, it was usually because of some kind of break down and it put the attack, and team, in dangerously unfamiliar territory. Attack spend all of their time trying to beat defensive sets and suddenly they’re on the other side of the battle. To combat this, my varsity coach gave the following advice, “Get to the net first and figure out what to do next once you get there.”

His point was, if all else fails, be the first person to reach the most important point on the field, and then figure things out from there. Run through all of the chaos, and get to the starting point. Once you’re in front of the net, you’re at least clogging up a key lane for the other team. You’re able to look out and find men to cover. You can be directed by the goalie or a defenseman to where you should be.

I think getting to the net first is exactly the type of advice early entrepreneurs need when getting to the essence of their idea. When you start out, there’s a million and one things your website and your business can be. You can offer the world’s greatest social network with messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions, but the problem is that everyone’s site has messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions. Now what?

You’ll find this same advice all over the place. Guy Kawasaki talks about the importance of having a mantra in the opening pages of The Art of the Start. Getting Real by 37signals hits you over the head with the ‘get to the net first’ mentality. From the first two pages of the Priorities chapter we hear things like, “Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app … What does your app stand for? What’s it really about?” and from the Ignore Details Early On section, “Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building.” If anything, listen to these guys.

Make things simple for yourself. If Twitter can make a business (and no one’s sure of that yet) out of 140 characters, there’s got to be more one line ideas out there. You probably need to take your idea and cut it in half. You might need to just focus on that one piece of your idea. You might even need to keep thinking about it, but better this than sounding the trumpets for the marketing team and business development teams before you’ve defined what you’re all about.

Once you have that idea, you’re only 0.01% of the way towards becoming a successful entrepreneur. Success will be found in the execution of the 99.99% of your other activities, but starting from the right point will make all the difference.

Get to the net first. What’s your idea?

Books, on the other hand, have been used to teach us for centuries. They were made to sequentially build knowledge from page 1 to page n. Early entrepreneurs struggling to get going will serve themselves well to read books (and blogs too). In addition to all of the online resources I’ll refer to in this blog, I’ll also periodically post book reviews and recommendations. Here’s my first.

Edward Tufte‘s Envisioning Information is a book almost everyone should read — that is, anyone who has ever looked at a graph, map, poster, schedule, manual, musical notation, monument, software application, or color palette, which is roughly ‘almost everyone’. It’s obviously not at all specific to web design but instead breaks down basic principles for understanding or creating any graphic information display

“It’s the way they draw these wretched tables.”

The book boils down to two themes. Without words, what are you trying to say and how should, or can, you say it? That statement’s a bit of a blunted version of his book, but if one remembers anything about this book those two themes should be it.

Tufte’s book is obviously a bit more detailed so to give you an idea of what’s inside, here’s a brief summary of the chapters:

• Escaping Flatland – Escaping Flatland is the central theme of the book. We live in a 3D world and (so far) we don’t have 3D information displays. What are we trying to display and how can we do it in 2D?
• Micro/Macro Readings – 2D displays are not only limited by a dimension, they’re also limited by area. How do you communicate a lot of information, with a little space, while still making details easy to find?
• Layering and Separation – One of my favorite sections, layering and separation focuses on identifying the different pieces of information that need to be displayed and how they can be distinguished from one another.
• Small Multiples – Graphical displays have to communicate range in time, blood flow, last week’s stock price. Comparing change is what makes data useful at all.
• Color and Information – Our eyes can only deal with so much. Using color appropriately helps save them from working too hard.
• Narratives of Space and Time – Combining space and time brings us back to the beginning. How do we recreate our world?

As hinted earlier, Tufte uses a variety of examples to communicate these themes. His design examples range in time from the Middles Ages to the software age. To illustrate the way we communicate time intervals, he uses a mix of planetary orbit paths, train schedules, and dance steps. Often, to emphasize his examples, he uses images with text in a variety of foreign languages where few, if any, of his readers will be able to understand them all. It requires you to read past the text and focus on his lessons.

Tufte’s book is just plain fun to read. His book makes well on its promise to employ good design. It’s constructed on a combination of well deployed white space, gray scale and color images, succinct explanations and useful side notes.

I’ll take away from this book an appreciation for information design in ways that are far more reaching than web design. It’s helped me better improve the way I read, understand, and am able to create any graphical display.

For anyone that’s looking for a place to start with any design, Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte is a great place to choose as your page 1. And, after that, he has a few other books..