I’m going to shamelessly nick a few images here from a site we designed, manage and host (Sniff Petrol) , but which is run and written by someone else. In finding this he showed a great example of why you should think about any new features you add to a website.

The idea seemed good enough – Car Magazine added a search terms Cloud, rather like a tag cloud, to their website to show what people were searching for. Problem is though, with any user generated content you have to watch carefully for abuse.

First off, they seeded the search cloud with a few terms that they obviously felt the aspirational and tasteful visitors would like – such as Aston Martin Vanquish, BMW M1, Ferrari and so on:

So far so good. Read more