Add an 'x' button to the "Try GitLab EE" pop-over
I opened the GitLab blog today to be greeted by a lovely new design. Kudos!
Imagine then my puzzlement to find that it's now actually harder to read the content. Reason being that it's mostly obscured by an advert.
All pretension aside, a corporate blog is essentially a marketing exercise; one big, on-going advert that your visitors enjoy. Why then cover it over with more adverts that they don't enjoy, especially when the articles already have the new call to action button to install GitLab at the end of each article anyway? Advertising inline or in white-space is all well and good, but covering your own content?!?
The image below demonstrates what I'm talking about; I can only read ~5 lines of the actual content that I came here to see before the pop-over obscures further lines. This may not be seen as such an issue for those that have invested in humongous screens, but not everyone has that luxury.
Now this could be down to the fact that the heading images are very large, but it wouldn't hurt to add an 'x' or 'close' button to the pop-over to allow readers to close it once they have seen and parsed it. This way you get to keep the large headers and the pop-over, but the user can still see the content they actually came here for.
(Extra brownie points if you can remember site-wide that the user closed the pop-over, per visit, and not keep re-showing it every time another blog page shows, until the next time the user visits the blog.)