Pop up windows to display more information

[J_Mac]

I am in the process of redesigning my site. On our homepage I will have some links leading to information of the more popular subjects we get many inquiries about. My question is this. When a visiter clicks on one of these links is it okay to have the new page load in a popup window or should it load in the main browser window?

I kind of like the idea of a popup window much like the way it is done at the Dell site. When building a system you can click on the learn more? links and the new page loads in a popup window. The visiter can then close it when done.

I know this may seem trivial to most of you but I just want to know what will work best before proceeding. Any input is appreciated and thanks in advance.

[jamesa]

If you mean for general navigation I'd say no.

If you have a form, for example, and want to have definitions or additional explanations of what a field means then yes. But I'd do a JS popup so you could make the window smaller, and also hard code the link in the A tag in case JS is disabled.

The other place I don't mind popups are 100% flash sites where they load the flash site in a small window. Otherwise popups are annoying IMHO.

[keyplyr]

I have a page with a historical timeline pertaining to my site theme. I was considering javascript popups to further describe the historical events while still maintaining view of the timeline (the parent window.) I asked about the pros and cons using this method and received 70% cons. Most of the negative responses were either aimed at the misuse of javascript or inappropriate and intrusive advertising popups - neither of which pertained to what I was talking about.

Convinced I was appropriate with using popups in this manner, I went ahead with the idea. Over the next few months, the webpage has jumped to a PR6 and gets easily a thousand hits daily becoming a new entry point for the site. Must be at least a few users who like JS and popups.

[tedster]

I use this method rather often (in fact, one place IS on a timeline) and it works extremely well for me. Make sure spiders can crawl to the pop-up documents and that a visitor from a search engine to the orphaned pop-up gets some navigation back into the main site.

The code I use is <a href="page.html" onClick="popUp('page.html');return false;">

As rcjordan has alerted me, watch out for the commonly used pop-up killers. Some of them disable the entire link -- so that even the vanilla page doesn't get served!

However, there is search engine gold in this method -- each pop-up page is a tighly focused document on one specific topic, and that can translate into one specific keyword phrase.

[c3oc3o]

An idea I picked up here on WebmasterWorld is to use:
<a href="page.html" onClick="popUp(this.href);return false;">
so you don't have to write all URLs twice per link.