Saturday, May 27, 2006

Last Cheque from Google

Last year cheques started arriving from Google for advertising on my web site. I had to get them to the bank quickly as they are printed on flimsy paper and fall apart.

Now I have got my last cheque from Google. They haven't decided to stop paying for ads, but have finally implemented electronic payments in Australia. After you enter the bank account number Google send you a small amount to verify the account.

One aspect I only noticed recently was that the ads were not showing up on Internet Explorer. I design my web pages so the content appears first and then the ads. This is so readers are not annoyed by sitting looking at ads, waiting for the content to download. Also, on small screen the ads don't push the content off the visible part of the page.

But Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 does a poor job of formatting some web pages. It doesn't obey the CSS width command and spreads some content over the next column. This pushes the ads down to the bottom of the page, where many viewers never see them. This seems to happen with side by side images, PRE formatted text and long strings of text with no spaces in them (such as long URLs). Hopefully Microsoft will fix this, but while I am using the old one I have to check web pages one by one and fix the formatting.

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