Everybody and their grandmother produces an easy to use subscription buttons so you can quickly add a Web site’s content to your iGoogle Web page or your My Yahoo! Homepage. When do you know that you are offering your readers or visitors too many options though?

Personally I don’t like seeing 200 different ways I can subscribe to a Web site when all I need is one. It makes the Web site look ugly in my opinion and there isn’t much room left for anything else. What is the solution?

You could ditch them all and just go with your average orange subscription button. Both the newest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer have pretty good RSS formatters out there. With Firefox especially you can select from a drop down menu for how you want to subscribe to the feed. If you are pushing your feed through FeedBurner - they give you the option of listing all those subscription icons on the RSS feed itself. That is handy too.

What I have started doing is listing three or four main ones on my sidebars on my various different Web projects, and then I’ll have a link to go to a “more subscription options” Web page. From there I have dumped every other cute subscription option on the planet. It keeps my sidebar clean and I can give people the option to use the other services if they want to.

[tags]annoying, icons, subscription, choices, design[/tags]