Chris Alexander
18th August, 2009
Thanks to everyone who was decent enough to answer my survey on my website’s advertising policy the other day (if you missed it, you can follow me on Twitter - @chris_alexander).
The uptake was about 30% of what I was hoping for, and a larger number certainly would have made decision making from the results easier, but none the less this is what I found.
Of the users who took the survey, exactly one third responded “Yes” to the question, “Do you find the use of advertisements on chris-alexander.co.uk obtrusive or decreasing your enjoyment of the site?”. This was a number I wasn’t particularly surprised about.
For the next question, “If you have used the search service on chris-alexander.co.uk, do you find it provides additional benefit over a basic WordPress search engine?”, one third of users said that they had no experience of the WordPress default search engine. Of the remaining two thirds, 85% had not used the search engine currently implemented on the site. 100% of the users that had used the search engine and had experience of the default WordPress search engine indicated that the current search provided no additional benefit over the WordPress engine, which was higher than I was expecting but also unsurprising.
Surprisingly (for me, at least), 100% of users taking the survey indicated that the advertisements on the site did not decrease the chance of them knowingly visiting the site (the question was “Are you more likely to visit chris-alexander.co.uk if there are no advertisements on it?”).
Many thanks once again to everyone who took part. I’d love to make this site as good for everyone as possible, so I will be considering your responses over the coming days. Safe to say, for now, I have some great plans for search on this site and more, so look out for those.