In the name of fuck website designers, WTF is wrong with you?

I’ve seen this problem with multiple restaurant websites, and it apparently had nothing to do with when they were taking online orders. Another annoyance is businesses that hide their shipping costs and related details, obliging you to go through the ordering process up to the final step, so that you can discover what they want to charge you and when the order should arrive.

I don’t have Facebook so if a company only has a web presence on Facebook, I give my money to someone else.

The sites with no address or hours are usually small local businesses with no e-commerce ability. My most recent example is a vacuum cleaner store. They do repairs. Hard to do that virtually.

They can’t email a technician to your location?

I will call them and ask. Wait, there is no phone number or address on their website. Never mind, I will go elsewhere

Are you sure you’re not on Etsy?

I that the new designer drug the kids are taking these days?

No idea. None of the shopping sites I go to sell anything like that.

I sometimes fell like saying to the website designer, “if you want to sell me your shit, you need to make your shit work with my shit. Not tell me to go out and buy new shit.”

It’s not even just that. It’s also that those small businesses aren’t hiring out 3rd party companies or contract workers who making a living designing sites. More often than not, it’s just the business owner or some of the employees building it with a template driven site builder (ie Wix). It’s so easy to do this without realizing you’re missing key information or that said info is buried elsewhere on the site and they need to manually move it to a more accessible place. That’s also how you end up with broken/generic links to social media sites. The template just plasters it on the page, but until you point it to your actual facebook/instagram page, it just goes to facebook . com/instagram . com.

Also, regarding the hours being correct or incorrect on Google. That’s a tricky one. Anyone can go and update the hours for any business. So far as I’ve been able to tell (though I haven’t looked that hard) there’s no way for the business to lock that down. I know we often have to fix ours after people change them for whatever reason.

That’s what happens to me most of the time when I try to look at a facebook page; half the screen covered by a demand that I log in. Except that there’s no way to close it.

And when you do call for something you can’t find or do on the website, you get landed on a hold line that keeps telling you over and over again ‘hey! we’ve got a website! you could go there!’

Duh. I know. Anybody who doesn’t know by now isn’t capable of dealing with a website anyway.

The OP’s mind must work differently than mine does. To me, putting hours, location, etc. under a “contact” link is perfectly logical. My thought process goes something like this–
Q. What sort of information do I need to call the business?
A. The phone number.
Q. Is calling them a form of contact?
A. Yes.
Q. Where would be a logical place for contact information to be listed?
A. In a section that says “contact.”

Same for location, in case I want to make my contact with them in person. Same for hours, so that I know when to reach them.

And, despite the business being located in the USA, and primarily serving the USA, they dutifully and respectfully put the 193 countries in alphabetical order, with “United States” fifth from the bottom right above Upper Volta and Zambia.

Which Is why I am glad I live in Arizona and no longer Wisconsin. :slight_smile:

I hate this. It’s usually because the shipping cost eclipses the cost the actual item you’re buying.

Another thing I hate is hiding the logout button. Especially if I’m on a bank type site I want to logout. Don’t hide this under some non-intuitive drop down menu!

Here’s one that drives me mental–seeing a blaring headline of “OMG TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN SPRINGFIELD, THOUSANDS DEAD!” and you click through to krap.com or wuss.com and they tell you everything about this terrible tragedy EXCEPT for what fucking state they’re in. They’ll tell you it’s the biggest tragedy ever in the “tri-state area” but never which three states they’re talking about. Would it fucking KILL them to put the state they serve up at the top of the banner for their website? I’m wondering if I should worry about friends who live in Springfield OR but it turns out the tragedy is actually in Springfield, Belize or Springfield, Manitoba or any one of about 400 fucking towns named Springfield. Put the fucking location of the tragedy IN THE COPY OF THE STORY because the internet is everywhere. Morons.

IME, as a Wisconsinite, most forms with drop down boxes will, upon hitting a letter, jump down to the first state that begins with that letter and subsequent presses will cycle though them. When I’m entering my address (keeping in mind I tab to get from one field to the next), when I get to the state part I hit W W W and then tab to the next box.

Oh totally!

They give the weather on the splash banner, fer cripes sake, but not the city!

This is why even profane rants should pay attention to proper punctuation.

Yes, I should have had “In the name of fuck, website designers, WTF…” :smile:

Yes you do. You’re lucky if you can see anything at all on the main page before you’re prompted to log in on the vast majority of pages, and as thorny_locust said, you can’t dismiss the prompt. On those few that you aren’t bugged to log in that way, you still can’t click on any links they have to past posts, menus, about us pages etc.

If you want to see what someone who doesn’t have Facebook sees, open a Facebook page in an “in private” window of your favorite browser without logging into Facebook (and without it knowing you have an account).