Pop-ups just don’t make much sense. Why would you want to upset the very people you’re trying to reach?

Imagine walking down the street and suddenly a person jumps out trying to block your view with a large poster until you touch the ad. Or worse, walks behind you with the ad everywhere you go until you turn around and tell them to go away.

Would you hold your resume in front of a potential employer’s face until they paid attention to you? I doubt it’s going to make a good first impression. It’s the same with pop-ups, and yet there’s still a demand from some web clients to build them.

How do we as professionals provide the best possible solution to clients even when they won’t budge on having pop-ups? Maybe pop-unders are a good compromise?

Christian Heilmann, describes how to create user friendly pop-under ads with CSS and DOM. The solution still hides the main content with an advert, which is a big no-no, but if it’s absolutely necessary, this is the best I’ve seen yet.

What’s particularly great about Christian’s solution is that it degrades nicely. Even if the user has JavaScript turned off, the advert still gets pushed but relocated to the bottom of the page. If a user is going out of his way to stop unsolicited actions like JavaScript, the last thing you want to do is try to circumvent it.