Just the other day I browsed across MSN's website and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I am guessing this is some mix between graphic designers and marketing gurus coming up with a website.
You can see what I am talking about here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38053726/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/
The bottom half of the screen is taken up by a non scrolling DIV that is full of supposed social networking SEO garbage. Once again the method of not helping the user out, but interrupting the user to get
something from them, which they are going to ignore in most cases. The only thing this is going to do is drive their customers away. How can I be sure about this? Well check out these screenshots I made:
800×600 screen resolution
I love this one because you can't even see the navigation bar without scrolling or the article, only the stuff you aren't interested in. Forget being on a mobile device, ipad, or netbook.
1024×768 – standard web resolution.
So now we can see the navbar but we can barley see the article.
Middle of article
Once again we don't have the navigation menu but we have huge block to promote MSN. Instead of wasting their time with that, they should have implemented our fixed scrolling header or something similar. Why not just have some social networking icons at the bottom or top of the article to share it? What boggles my mind is the amount of money that was most likely spent developing this, only to be a total waste to users and MSN.