The Courant doesn’t get it

Update, 5/13/09: They stopped with the obnoxious advertising (at least for now) – this morning’s Courant.com doesn’t have a mouseover action anywhere in evidence. I don’t know whether to celebrate that I can read the Courant online again or be disappointed that my self-righteous rant is no longer pertinent .

As someone who checks the Courant’s site most days to see what’s up in CT, I’ve been meaning to make note of this.

Above we find the Courant’s home page, an actual unretouched screenshot in all of its mouseover-happy flash-based glory. Seriously, all it’s lacking is Bonzi Buddy and I’d be right back in the web circa 1999/2000. I know, I know…ad revenue needed to keep the site afloat, blah blah blah. I don’t care though. I’m certainly not going back there as long as “Il Douchebags” are going to pop out of the top corner of my screen at me.

n.b. to the Courant, here’s how you pull off a news webpage that people might actually consider visiting more than once:

Even though my screenshot was flippant, you’re welcome to try and calculate the content-to-ads ratio on the above the fold home page of both of those sites and compare them. Only to make the contest fair, when you’re doing your calculations for the Courant’s site, you have to have a video of a Clown selling mail-order herbal viagra surreptitiously start on your screen. Otherwise you haven’t gotten the full effect of reading Courant.com.