Share/Like Buttons & Location
That last few weeks, when I have had the time and the motivation I have been toying around with additional and possibly replacement share buttons for my blogs. Two primary reasons is that while I love the sharing option I have currently for Facebook, it would be nice to also offer a like button and I currently do not have that option. Beyond that, I have yet to see much offered in regards to Google+ (more about Google+ tomorrow) and I think getting on that is going to important moving into the future. So now I am at some crucial choices and curious as to what other folks think.
First, in my research and as I have known, it is important for any scripting involved in the buttons to be delayed on the load until after your content is loaded. Of the ones I have looked at only about half them do this. If you are using one that loads prior to your content in regards to its scripts it will negatively impact your search engine crawl rankings and so forth.
That aside, in looking further I found I could include some of the capability with ShareThis, the plugin I have often used for my sharing. It did however, require customization on my part (not that I really minded this) to get the Google+ and Facebook Like buttons. It also had limited functional capabilities, at least in my opinion compared to some other options out there. When all is said and done, I may very well move back to using this tool for the functions I want.
I did find a couple of plug-in tools that I really liked for this purpose and that are also extremely simple to set up. I love them in fact. Though, they have a very limited feature set of who/what I could present of the user to share/like. The big issue with this is the possibility of having to use multiple tools to get the things I want and then of course the issue of getting everything looking right to be mixed on the page then becomes an issue.
What I am noticing with looking at these tools though, and indeed looking at a LOT of blogs and other sites is the placement of these buttons. A huge trend of instead of having them at either the top or the bottom of the page/post is instead to throw them out on the left in a box outside of even the margins in general. Often time this box scrolls with the user down the page, which is nice to keep that like/share button right there for when the user decides it is worthwhile.
The big draw back? If you have a standard almost box screen from a few years ago (ie not wide format) especially in combination with lower resolution capability the share/like button box can float in right over the content that I am so wanting folks to see, read, and find enough in it to like. I suppose the trend is moving this direction because most of us who blog and develop on the web are well into at least our second wide-screen device, but remember the other 50% or so of the web who move a few years behind and it is potentially a big cut in user base that could be impacted. Here are a few example pictures to see just what I am talking about.
Compare these images. Â The first is with a wide screen display using a full sized browser window. The second is a smaller browser window or the same size as a none wide format screen. Â Compare those images to this this page with the buttons located at the head of the post horizontally. Thoughts?
the second one is f*^%ed up what do i win?
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