I’m working on updating my review site, and part of that process for me is to line up sites for listing / short reviews prior to doing a full review. I’ve been going over a few of the site selection, and I just keep seeing things that drive me nuts on tours. Of course there’s all the usual traffic leaks and other annoying crap off my affiliate links, but I’ll ignore that for now.

Tour Annoyances

Instead, I’m going to embrace my surfer side for a moment (scary, I know) and talk about how goddamn annoying some of this stuff is. The first big thing I noticed - no Join link to hit immediately. If I’ve been presold on the stuff, either by a review or a gallery or what have you, I don’t want to go through a tour. I want to buy it right now, and when I have to either actively search for the join link because it’s hidden somewhere, or click through 15 pages of tour - you can guess that my desire to buy has gone significantly down.

Second are all the sites that don’t bother to tell me how much their membership options are. I’m sure someone thought that was a good idea, and it’s not as big a turn off as the first complaint. However, I hate having to click on pay by credit card when I have no idea how much it’s going to be. Obviously the price point can be indicated in the presell that sent them to the site, but how many people are actually going to remember that?

Going off the second point, having to give ANY type of information prior to actually being told how much I will be paying is ridiculous. Whoever thought that was a good idea is out of their minds.

Flash based sites get my ire a lot because 9 times out of 10, the flash does nothing to enhance the site functionality. This holds true for tours, where I have to wait for the flash to load up and play before I even get a chance to go on the tour. Don’t make me wait, you can have all the flash you want but at least include an alternative navigation bar in the footer.

Members area sections that are shown on the tour (such as those that just use the same layout from tour to member area) that make you repeatively click cancel just to stop the login prompt. If I want to get off, the last thing I want to deal with is clicking by your sidebar links by mistake and having a login popup not want to go away. At the very least, just let it go to server 401 after the first try. What would be even better is if your 401 errors go to your join page (with the bloody price on it!!!!!!)

Member Area Annoyances

This is a fun one. Consider that maybe I’ve signed up even after jumping through some of the hoops above. One thing I’m amazed at - how many sites seem to have their member’s area on a much crappier server than what their tour is on. Do you really think people are just going to ignore the fact that it takes forever to load up the content?

Not making it easy to see the latest updates is another great trick. On one site I went through several sections that haven’t been updated in months (there’s a great impression to keep the surfer there) before I finally found where their weekly update was. Don’t make me dig.

These next few are more of a personal preference than anything else, but I do see these options on a lot of sites. When I get these little features taken away after having the convenience on other sites, it tends to bug me just a little bit. Zipped photo sets, high and low quality movies (or just downloadable movies in general), search with many different categories to narrow things down, and paginated and breadcrumb browsing. It’s funny how these simple little things can improve the browsing experience so much and make me want to stick around.

Proper navigation is one feature that far too many sites seem to overlook. Here’s a little tip - making your stuff harder to browse through doesn’t make the surfer stay longer to try to wade through it all with awkward browsing. They just go to your competitor. For the love of God, list your major sections on a top or sidebar. If you want to include sub categories under the sections, that’s just gravy.

I’ve been busy busy busy working on things around here! Between my ever so lovely clients (you can see the batting eyelashes, right?) and my own personal projects, it’s been hectic. Here’s a brief portfolio update (since it’ll be awhile before I get a chance to put them in my main portfolio).

Bulk Adult blog posting - Lots and lots of blog posts! I don’t know why, but I tend to enjoy blog posting the most out of any type of project. For this project, I’m writing hot, keyword rich titles and text, picking out galleries with theme specific pictures, doing a bit of basic graphics work, and making sure everything is nicely search engine optimized.

I had a chance to write up a handy questionnaire. I originally intended to send it to clients interested in bulk blog post projects. Feel free to put it to personal use, as well. It should help you define what your blog is about, and who you want your target audience to be, among other things. Think of it as a blog business plan.

Meta tag/description optimization - I actually had two projects that dealt with this. One was for mainstream, and the other was for an adult client.

DVD Description - This was a fun little project for Whorecraft. The owner requested I take a look at their preexisting product copy for their second episode. I spruced up their text and got to have a lovely 18 minutes watching Mia Rose. Have I mentioned that adult writing blows mainstream out of the water?

Flash Presentation Script via Nasty Graphix - This was an interesting mainstream project. I can’t say that I’ve ever worked on a script before, so this was a learning experience (with lots of reading out loud).

Privatefeeds Magazine - I believe I mentioned the St. Petersburg article that I worked on previously for Privatefeed’s client magazine. Two other related projects have been an introduction article and a Q&A interview style article for the magazine. I had a chance to look at the layout for the Petersburg article - it’s going to look awesome.

Klixxx Magazine - I mentioned this before, but Massive Multiplayer Sex and CMS Basics should be showing up in the next few month’s Klixxx magazine.

Massive Online Gamer - The druid article was published in their September 2006 issue, and I just sent in the warlock guide article. Go WoW!

Spicy Relationships - This project involved front page copy to introduce four web content articles.

More Niche - Sex positive educational articles for men.

Batts - Aussie attack! Batts was looking for engaging text for some very engaging websites. I provided all of the affiliate site text and the tour text for his solo girl site.

I think this covers most of the projects I’ve been working on the last two months. I promise to update more often, I’ve been slacking on my own site!

I’ve mentioned the wonderful Carpe Jugular site previously. There’s a ton of tutorials and great articles over there for adult webmasters, so go check it out if you haven’t already.

It looks like Jayeff is dabbling in premade Wordpress templates. He has a great looking (and tableless/compliant) 2 and 3 column template in purple and black for 49.00. As you can probably tell, I’m a sucker for Wordpress themes of all shapes and sizes - at least, ones that don’t use tables.

So if you’re stuck for ideas for a Wordpress theme, hop on over to Carpe Jugular and see the goods.
I’m using it over at Artistic Bondage if you wanted to see it in action. :)

Need sponsors, resources, or help with your retro and vintage porn promotion? Here’s a site I just set up for that purpose. Take a look at Vintage Resource.

I’ve been working on a retro porn themed side project. I ended up going through a lot of sponsor sign ups in order to find exactly what I was looking for. Along the way I ended up with a lot of programs that offered little to no promotional content or broken content links. I figured I should share this list with anyone who is looking for promote the lovely niche of vintage and retro porn. If I’ve missed programs, please leave me a note in my comments or at my email selenia AT shadow-moon.com. Please note that promotional material information only pertains to the sites that I list - the programs may have different promo material for other sites. This list is in no particular order - newest additions will be at the top!

(This list is getting huge and I want to add in vintage articles/content providers/review/tgp/LL etc so I’m branching this out into its own site, Vintage Resource. The resources at Vintage Resource will be kept up to date, although I will update the list here when I get a chance.

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