I loved your corporate website!

The BBQ Pit
1

Forgive me for being so gushing, but I just have to share the happy online experience I had at your website. It obviously cost a lot of money and it showed – all those animations, sound effects and reactive buttons were very slick. Admittedly I had to wait a minute to download the latest version of Flash, but it was worth it to see your corporate logo coming over the horizon like a rising Sun! I needed a tea break anyway. I guess anyone with a dial-up connection would have been screwed, but who needs business from yokels like that?

Apparently (you’ll laugh at this!) a mate of mine who works for another company wasn’t able to get onto your website either. At his firm, staff aren’t allowed to just download and install stuff on their computers, and your website needs the latest version of Flash! These people should get with the times! I’m sure everyone at your place can download and install whatever they want.

Great homepage! A big picture of your most impressive building (very nice!), links to your Mission Statement, PAGES of press releases about how great you are. AND a picture of your Managing Director, smiling and looking very professional. One of my workmates said that one fat old smug bastard in a suit looks much like another, but she’s just a cynic. I think it’s good to know the face behind the company. (Actually, he does look a bit smug. Maybe you have a better photograph?)

Just a heads-up – the search engine is a fantastic feature, but it didn’t find one of your products. In fact, the trademarked brand name of one of your leading lines gave no hits! That can’t be right, can it? I wouldn’t want you not to be getting value for money from your site designers! Anyway, you have a Product Information section only six or seven clicks away from the homepage, so I went there after I found it. It was fun, like an Easter Egg hunt!

Your marketing people have cleverly made a pop-up form, asking for a load of personal details before anyone can get any information on products of yours they might want to buy! Good idea! Keeps away timewasters, and gets you information! The same cynical workmate from before reckoned that I should just use one of your competitor’s products rather than going to all the trouble of registering, but I like to be thorough. It was no bother anyway, you can write in any old crap and it still accepts it! I’m afraid I was a bit naughty and gave “fuckoff@cocksucker.com” as an email address. It’ll give someone a laugh, eh?

So I got into your product information but I’m afraid no joy on finding what I wanted – your organisation is a bit beyond me I’m afraid. (Doh!) But I Googled for it instead, and found a link to a pdf on your very website! When I clicked on it, the same registration form popped up that I’d already filled in, which was a bit of drag. But no worries – your mirror site in Finland had the same pdf with no pop-up! (I’d get that fixed if I were you – you wouldn’t want people using that mirror to avoid registration!). AND Google also had all the same info in their “view as html” link. Can you sue them? I mean, it is your information, after all!

The product itself is great, the specs match up nicely against those of your competitors, and I would have loved to buy a few. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to contact anyone from your company – try as I might, I couldn’t find a single phone number, fax number or email address on your website! Really, you should get that search engine sorted. I was going to look you up in the phone book, but unbelievably I was instructed to go with an alternative. Your competitor has a poxy little website with NO search engine, but they stuck their main phone number right on the home page. You could do that – just nudge that article on your latest takeover deal up a couple of lines and it would squeeze right in! I wouldn’t stick a whole paragraph of contact details on the home page like they did though – you might have to lose the link to your Mission Statement, and we couldn’t have that.

Have a good one!

2

Bravo.

Now tell me you actually found an email link and sent it to them.

No? Don’t worry they’ll never know you will never come back will they.

It will keep the corporates happy with an attitude of “Hey, no-one is complaining so we must be doing it right”.

Asshats.

3

This wasn’t Bechtal by any chance?

or some native corporation from Alaska suddenly in the world security business and guarding US military bases/business under the no bid native prererance claw?

4

This sort of thing gripes my hide. My sites may not be very sophisticated, but visitors using Windows 3.1 and/or Netscape 3 are still able to visit and glean information. For that, I am proud. Not that everyone’s site should be that “backwards compatable,” but hey, it’s not a bad goal, is it?

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a site will tell me that I need to use IE to view their pages. I don’t like to use IE, on my Mac and especially on my PC. I do not understand why some people design sites that are meant to exclude rather substantial chunks of people, especially when it’s quite obvious that most sites manage to be pretty accessable to everyone. And same goes for the few sites that exclude Macs (and, possibly, other platforms). Hey, we’ve got Mozilla or Firefox too, these are perfectly good browsers, what’s the deal here?

Not that this is a Mac/PC thing. I mean, if they don’t care if I see their site, if they want to cut off their nose to spite their face, that’s what they should do. However, I am fully aware that the goal of web sites is to get people to visit. To get those precious hits. That’s the whole damned point. And so when someone deliberately designs a site so that visitors are turned off, sent away, or fed up, it seems the height of absurdity to me.

5

My biggest gripe: No freakin’ phone number. No email address. WTF are they thinking?

6

One of the finest tracts of sarcasm I have ever read. Bravo!
I don’t suppose you’ll let us know who it is so we can all make fun of their website, too?

7

These stupid-ass sites are usually designed by a design agency - a high degree of design skills but usually from a print background, and are overly obsessed with gimmicks.

Then there are the corporate sites that People Like Me design, which aren’t the prettiest things, but they are built by people who know the web and are habitual users of it, and don’t want to be dealing with all that frippery and flimflam.

I occasionally lose contracts to the hype design people, because the clients want all the bells ‘n’ whistles too. Fuck 'em.

8

I wish I could write half so well! :slight_smile:

9

Sadly, the ethic of “failing gracefully” has completely fallen by the wayside. Expect things to get worse. Web designers will “push the envelope” and design for higher resolution monitors, high-speed access, and automatically show sound and video when you load the page. Ever since the Web was settled, the corporations have been trying to turn it into television.

10

Touches wood. I’m just waiting for flash-animated you-need-ie-for-this-site complaints.

PS. Great rant.

11

Are we going to get a link?

+10 for rant. -9 for no link.

12

matt, matt, matt…why don’t you tell us who they are?

Holding out on us all, when we could be ruthlessly mocking them…shame on you! :smiley:

13

I was a dedicated Netscape user until it occurred to me that some of the web pages I was looking at were missing lots of information that only comes up in IE. Bastards. Now I have to use the inferior IE if I want to see everything (I tried Firefox, but I couldn’t sign on to the Dope with it, so buh-bye). Colour me less than impressed.

Excellent rant. You’re more patient than I am - when I run across sites like that, I usually just back out and be done with it.

14

The “corporate website” of the rant is a composite that incorporates all of my favourite features. I don’t know of any site that has all of them at once - I sincerely hope there aren’t any!

The rant-prompter was a possible client that might just put my name and location together and figure out who is slagging them off, so I can’t name names.

For an example of incessant prompts for the latest Flash plug-in, and having to give them a load of marketing info before you can download their product information, there’s these guys…

http://www.spectro-ai.com/pages/e/p010103.htm

15

I think you should try it again. Maybe you had it set to ‘no cookies’. A large number of people here are using Firefox. This post is being written on FireFox for the Mac, but I use it almost exclusively it on my work and home PCs. No problems at all, except for [url=http://www.benedictshotel.co.uk/]ghastly pile of shit corporate website*, which only works in IE.

16

Oh brilliant. And right on their front page, is a photo displayed smaller than its actual size. Resize the photo in an editor; don’t make the browser do it! 1) IThe browser resizing looks terrible, that’s how I knew immediately what they’d done, 2) it’s a waste of bandwidth to load a great big file when all you display is a teeny weeny one. I’ve seen people put up “thumbnails” that link to a “larger version” of the photo this way, which entirely defeats the purpose of thumbnails.

17

Well, if you want a POS corporate website that runs useless Flash animations (and you MUST have the latest version of Flash to access the site)

look no further.

A LOT of corporate websites are like this. I’m afraids that ignorance is winning out there …

18

Wow, that’s atrocious. I like how Michigan is a gelatinous mass and how RanDoM LettERs are CaPitALizeD. I didn’t know that was considered a new design trend.

And apparently their new salads come in white boxes. At least, that’s all I get when I click on the link.

I appreciate the 10-second wait while all the colors spread out every time you click on something, too. It’s nice to be gently eased into a design like that, rather than overwhelmed with the striped yellow and blue all at once.

19

And don’t you love their witty little asides? Like when you mouse over the picture of the building, and a little pop-up bubble says: “We call it a building, but it’s already built. Weird.”

Morons.

20

What really gets me is the internal intranet sites where I work. Most of them assume that you have your desktop display settings at a high resolution. If it’s not 800 x 600, I can’t see the print clearly without having my nose 6 inches from the monitor. But at that setting I can only get about 3/4 of the intranet pages, which have no scroll bars. :wally