I’ve encountered this myself. I saw a pizza restaurant in Seattle that I wanted to try, but the only way to view their menu is to go through their online ordering platform, which wouldn’t even show me the menu if the restaurant wasn’t open. That’s not a good way to advertise your wares to potential customers.
I did that using Chrome and… it’s fine? There’s a login nag at the bottom of the screen but it’s perfectly usable for getting the store location, phone number and hours. I made a new Incognito window, checked a local asphalt paving contractor and it was the same. I’ll admit that, after those were what I expected, I then moved on and didn’t survey a bunch of places in fresh Incognito windows or anything. I won’t discount the possibility that it doesn’t work in some other browser or with 50% of sites, etc
Also, I completely agree that a store’s website should have this information front and center. Not trying to debate any points here, just thought that some people’s complaints that Facebook was unusable to see a business page without an account didn’t match my experiences.
Yeah it’s much smaller now than I remember it being. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being twice as tall.
I thought this was gonna be about porn.
I needed a new couch, so I drove to the furniture store. They had a big sign that read “Visit www.furniturestore to view inventory”. So I went back home. Went to the website. It said, “Visit our Showroom to view inventory”
Read that in a Steven Write-esq tone.
It’s real simple.
The online inventory is in the store. The store inventory is available online.
.goof attachment.
Dan
When I had an on-line business selling custom guitar parts, I had a contact page.
I also had my name, mailing address, email address, and phone number at the bottom of every single item-offered page. Wasn’t a hardship.
Dan
Second that. I’ll visit the website of a restaurant, perhaps in the morning even though it’s a dinner-type place mostly to look at the menu. But the stupid ordering application just says, “Sorry, we’re closed now.”
The phone number is a form of contact, sure. But I’ve never heard of anyone who considers it “contact” to actually drive out to a business. If I said I contacted Walmart, you would assume I called them or emailed them, not that I drove out to the store.
That’s not to say I have any trouble finding that information. I’m used to websites for places that don’t have a physical presence, so I got used to the “About” or “Contact” buttons. And I do think it’s less effort to click those than to scroll to the bottom of most pages. But it does seem odd to me to not list that information front and center if the goal of your website is to get people to come to your business.
It’s hard to think of other information that would be more important, unless you actually have a working online storefront and want to sell items directly from the front page (e.g. like the above mentioned Walmart). So stick that info on the front page, above the fold.
IMO this would be great if you were writing lines of code but when I go to a business’ website I don’t want to go through a mental decision tree just to find something so obvious and necessary.
Also, depending on the site that information isn’t always in a Contact tab, if there actually is one.
I used one place that almost got it right, but then went to a next level of awful. They had all of the relevant contact and hours information at the bottom of the page. Great, easy to find, just scroll down. Except, they also used an infinite scrolling gallery or something, so as soon as you’d get to the bottom of the page, see what you want, the pictures would fill in, and move the bottom of the page off the screen. Repeat.
Yes, those infinite scrolling pages are maddening.
This morning’s design flaw that annoys is courtesy of Del Taco. They have a link on your receipt to an on-line survey of your experience. Well designed survey, takes all of 15 seconds to take then they email you a $1 off coupon.
Which, if you just hit “Print,” takes 5 pages of color to produce. You can’t just print the page with the QR code, because it’s stuck in the middle of a bunch of other stuff nobody cares about except the companies that sell toner. Is it all that hard to put the junk at the top (or bottom) of the pages so it can be printed off easily? Apparently so.
I know I can edit everything out by copying the page to my own system, BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO!
If you have a web page for a local business that does retail or any other service that is dependant on visiting the business location, the address and phone number should be in the header. Below the header should be your hours of operation.
Its a no brainer to include such information on your letterhead, why the fuck would you not put it in the header of your web page?
Ony providing a ‘contact us’ link may be appropriate for a purely web based business, but for any business that relies on customers attending the actual business location it is idiocy.
This guy contacted WalMart.
In those cases, I usually end up hitting the print button, then in the print preview pane, changing it from “all pages” to which ever page the info I need is on.
If they’re been driving a manned DeLorean, this wouldn’t have happened.
Which still wastes toner because the QR code is in the middle of a bunch of ads and food shots.
If you have Windows, you might be able to capture just the QR code with the Windows Snipping Tool and then paste it to a blank document.
That’s what I finally ended up doing, after much fiddling about. Still pisses me off, though.