Skip to main content

You Can't Get Paid If They Can't Find Your Payment Info

Most of my earned income is made on the internet. I do some website work for local clients in the small town where I live, but most of it comes from resume editing, freelance writing and blogging and all of that gets done online.

Trying to monetize creative work online, like blogging, is a constant challenge. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I keep running into is just trying to make it easy for people to give me money.

It's surprisingly hard to make sure people can readily find that information.

This post was written because I had someone email me and tell me they couldn't find that information ANYWHERE. They had looked!

I verified my payment info for them and asked which of my many websites they had been on while looking for that information and they said it was my personal blog. I thought it was very prominently displayed on my personal blog.

Well, maybe if you are on a PC with a big screen. Not so much if you are on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.

They were on a smartphone, so, for them, that information was hidden behind a "hamburger" drop-down menu. They simply hadn't noticed the "hamburger."

This was someone I had reason to believe was fairly tech savvy, so this was concerning. If they couldn't readily find it, then I had a serious problem.

More than half of all searches these days are performed on a smartphone. So if your mobile website has a problem, you have a big problem because this is probably the primary way your visitors will view your site.

I promptly set out to remedy that. This was how it looked on my PC:


Desktop

But this was how it looked on my cheap smartphone:

Mobile view

You had to click into that "hamburger" menu icon to get to the sidebar where the payment info was:

Sidebar

I tried a few different things, including putting the payment info in its own section between the header and the page menu, which was really ugly and bad UI design:

I then decided to replace the descriptor -- The personal blog of Doreen Traylor -- with the payment information. This seemed to be the best solution for that issue, but it also prompted me to look at some other things going on with the main landing page.

I ultimately did more tweaks, including moving some lower traffic pages from the Page menu to their own section in the sidebar and putting a photo of me in the sidebar in place of where the payment info used to be. This made a big difference in moving important information to prominent positions and deprecating or eliminating other information that is just noise for most people, most of the time.


Final Layout (Mainpage)



Final Layout (Sidebar)



Final Layout, Desktop Version


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Me and Languages

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. Mom was born and mostly raised in Danzig, a very cosmopolitan freistadt (independent city state), except for the years that the family spent in the country during World War II to try to safeguard everyone as best they could. When the war ended, she found herself in the newly created communist East Germany where she was required to take Russian in school, which is why I know a few words of Russian. She left East Germany to return her sister's baby to her , so she was a young illegal immigrant in West Germany when she met my father at a party. She spoke extremely proper High German. His American accent plus the fact that he mostly learned German from farmers, meant she couldn't understand a word he spoke and she asked someone what language he was speaking. My older sister was born in Germany. Her first language was actually German and she translated for my parents while she was a toddler. So I grew up in a bilingua...
Read more

L'Histoire

I'm basically a total fucking loser. I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, along with my Korean best friend who was number two and some guy who was number one. I had a raftload of impressive academic credentials for a high school student from the "backwater" state of Georgia, including State Alternate for the Governor's Honors program, a residential summer enrichment program for gifted students. That means in tenth grade, only two other people in the state of Georgia outperformed me (likely both were older than me) for applying to the program in a specific subject area and had one of them failed to be able to participate, I would have taken their place. I achieved that placement after somewhat flippantly choosing some subject or other (maybe journalism) as my area of interest because unlike most of the other gifted kids in my school, I didn't have some stand-out area of strength. I was someone doing well overall and it was essen...
Read more

Medical care in the US

This is a thought I've had a long time: If you served in the US military and were honorably discharged , you should get medical benefits for the rest of your life . That would drastically reduce the need for Obamacare which is a lousy solution to what's wrong with American healthcare. We have some of the best medical stuff in the world -- IF you're rich. In fact, people travel here to get it -- IF they're rich. Meanwhile, most of our people are left out in the cold and living with stupid levels of stress about the COST of medical care, etc. We should not be putting the health of wealthy foreigners above that of the American people. I mean unless you WANT the world to invade, take us over and etc. The people who raised their right hand and swore to give their life for their country and were honorably discharged should be told by actions, not words, "You are the kind of people America values." Obamacare just plays into this bullshit medical system where money ...
Read more