Guilty pleasures.

I've got some confessions to make about my guilty pleasures. Please don't laugh.

1. The Spin Doctors. First band I ever saw live. Two Princes still rocks.


2. Smallville. Been watching it on E4 lately. Clark, how could you not love Chloe? You're mad, that's how.


3. Adverts. Not all of them - that damn Charmin advert isn't exactly a favourite - but a lot of them. And the medium itself. Sorry.

You see, adverts appeal to me in so many ways. As a writer/performer of comedy, the advert has a lot of parallels (for me) with the sketch show, especially post Fast Show.

From a marketing perspective, obviously advertising has a huge role to play, and TV adverts are a massive part of that.

But the reason I'm mentioning them here is so that I remember to write an article about the "Bam!" factor of websites.

In short, the web is saturated with content and Google, Yahoo! and a huge number of other portals and search engines are just waiting to serve up hundred of other possible pages which might fulfil your users' needs - unless you make sure they know early on that they're on the right page. There are ways to do this with the positining of elements, careful use of colour and animation in the right places, and keeping content above the fold but you need to make sure your site entry points - the pages you're getting visitors referred to by search engines - say exactly what they're about to provide quickly, clearly, and in an engaging way. You've got about 30 seconds to convince people to invest time and effort making more of your site. About the same amount of time as a TV advert.

But please, please, don't use bears performing bowel movements to do that.