Every year I get an Astronomical Calendar for myself and three other family members. After I enter one order, the system does not permit me to order the other three. How lame! I always end up on the phone.
When I get a resub notice from Scientific American, there are always one, two, and three year options. The online site allows only one year. How lame! I always end up on the phone. This year they added a signin and password system that would not, for some reason allow me to sign up. Back to the phone.
Yeah, even that is too much work nowadays. Paypal already knows my name, address, email and cc number. Damned if I’m going to be bothered to type all that in.
I’m reasonably sure they do it on purpose since it’s sector-wide: the websites of every single phone company operating in Spain constitute a perfect example of “utter nightmares”, specially if you’re trying to find a way to contact them other than “walk into one of our stores” (for those which have them) or “call [this] phone number” (for those without stores). Mind you, they also do things like not have any customer service on Sundays at all…
Seems fine to me. All the info I need to get from them is there, and it’s easy to find. It’s a much better than the bunch of swoopy flash-encrusted bullshit that lots of companies use. The style is dated, but it’s perfectly functional.
By your metric, you could point to this site as being pretty bad, but they seem to be doing just fine with business on the internet.
I could go along with that argument, but there is something to be said for making a presentable face of the company. It’s like a CEO showing up for a investor’s meeting in sweatpants. (Of course, Buffet could probably get away with that).
Yea, but that site design is part of the Craigslist’s don’t-give-a-hoot mentality that is completely uninterested in making a profit. That no-frills ugly-arse interface probably keeps the bandwidth needs low and the costs down.
American Airlines is pretty rough. Not very easy to move around, tiny fonts, lots of expiring navigation. (I understand exactly why they expire, but it’s one of the few sites I use that does so I always get surprised when I go Back and it’s expired). And it always thinks I live in Washington DC, which is kinda annoying. Redeeming miles is more cumbersome than it needs to be.
On the bright side, check out that current Fare Sale between PDX and Sau Paulo (GRU)!
My highrise will not consider a default mortgage payment, and insists on mailing monthly bills (to all 360 residents) and receiving mail-in checks. I’ve tried to explain that setting up a system that deducts the mortgage payment every month from our checking accounts is easy to do, but no. They want us to write out a check every month --“That’s how we’ve always done it.”
That reminds me–the apartment complex I live in does all its record keeping (at least as far as rent amounts owed and collected on paper. They have this giant book of blank spreadsheets they use for it.
A lot of smaller businesses have websites that are overly convoluted. Essentially, if it’s a bricks and mortar store I’ll be visiting all I need to know is its phone number, its location, and its opening hours. A lot of stores fail to provide these key bits of information or hide them in the bowels of a badly designed site. Obviously there are other things that they could provide but these three are essential.
A number of local stores also have really badly taken or formatted photos of their stock. A blurry image of a shirt is worse than no image!
I forgot to mail in my water bill last time around, and only remembered the day before I’d incur a late fee. No option to pay online, so I called them up, assuming I’d be able to do debit/credit/check over the phone, like that.
Nope. They can’t even take debit cards. To avoid the late fee I had to drive there and pay the damn thing in person.
I also find Lowes, Home Despot and Menards all search-unfriendly sites.
Related: Businesses that have phone numbers like “1 800 NEW DOOR” without providing the numerical equivalent. Maybe I’m dense, but how do you dial that on a phone with a qwerty keyboard?
I’m only familiar with the iPhone, but when you’re in keypad mode, it shows a standard phone layout, with the letters underneath the numbers. But yeah, how hard would it be for the business to just give the numerical equivalent in the first place?
A lot of “web design firms” are just people who know how to apply styles to Wordpress or other pre-coded site software. So these firms go about aggressively selling sites to small businesses who probably obviously need a new site, but they don’t need a Wordpress site, but the price is unbelievably cheap (because Wordpress is free) so they get a Wordpress site. And while Wordpress can be tickled and tweaked to do a lot of neat things, the guy who sold you “a site” for $200 is not going to be able to make it do those neat things. So now you have a blog-style site for a business that has had no news or updates for 25 years and no one can find your phone number because it’s buried in a blog post from 2009 that is masquerading as a “web page.”
Amen to these. I have a Blackberry Bold (work phone) and run into this problem all the time. And to make it just a little bit worse, our work voice mail prompts me to “Press ‘P’ to play.” No, not the QWERTY one, the one that would be on the 7 key. I can see the logic of designing a system where it’s “P for play, D for delete” etc., but really, knowing it will be used by people on phones, wouldn’t it make more sense to use the numbers?
:eek: