And why is their “arriving today” and “arriving tomorrow” buttons bordering on useless. You can click them, but an awful lot of things slip through that won’t be delivered for a lot longer than a day or two.
Not just for searches-- I hate webpages in general that jump things around on the page as various elements load. It’s especially common with news pages, I find: you’re reading a paragraph, and all of a sudden a video or something shows up, and that paragraph isn’t on the screen any more, and you have to figure out which way to scroll to find it.
I mean, I get that not everything loads at once. But being able to set aside a specific space for some element, once it loads, has been part of HTML for as long as inline images have been. Why can’t anyone do it any more?
Or, as noted by someone else, it’s the right way to build a search engine – for Amazon’s revenues. My POV was entirely self-centered and I realize it’s not a reasonable expectation that the Capitalist Overlords would smooth my path for my own benefit.
It only works if customers are ovine enough to let it. If people go to Amazon looking for one product but meekly give up and accept whatever Amazon gives them as a substitute, then yes, Amazon wins by forcing more profitable substitutes via its search engine.
But if customers refuse to let this happen - if customers collectively say “This is the product I’m looking for. If you direct me to this product, I’ll buy it. If you direct me towards something else, I won’t buy that.” - then Amazon will quickly learn, via the marketplace, to efficiently direct customers to the products they are looking for.
I wasn’t defending the UI, just suggesting a solution that doesn’t need a printer.
Not really on topic, but really irritating is the Apple TV website. I just wanted to see my account info and payment history for the monthly streaming service. Turns out the monthly streaming service is Apple TV+. Apple TV is a completely different thing. That’s not confusing at all.
However, more on topic is that once I did find my account info, I was unable to locate payment history. I just wanted to see the last date and amount I was billed for a little spreadsheet. Pretty darn easy to find on Netflix and Hulu, but apparently for Apple TV+ it’s in your Apple account. The account you set up when you buy an iPhone or set up iTunes or whatever. If, like me, you have never touched an Apple product in your life, the very first step to see your Apple TV+ payment history is to go to the “Report a Problem” feature.
That’s a shit first step.
(If you Google how to do it, the very first step invariably begins “On your Apple device, …” I guess only Apple users are supposed to subscribe to the streaming service?)
EDIT: For the US, google says Windows is 75% of the market and Android is 46%. (Android is 75% worldwide.) Why you gotta make it so hard for us Windows / Android users, Apple TV+?
I don’t see why $100 is too cheap for a barebones static webpage. Contact info, link to new patient document, office hours, and maybe a few words about what we do.
I mean if I can do the design on paper in five minutes, I don’t see why a professional needs more than a half hour to turn it into a webpage. I could probably do it myself in a half hour. $100 for a half hour of professional work is a professional rate of $200/hr, which is crazy.
And those website designers that came and pitched to us, they wanted $1000 a month, in perpetuity.
~Max
Probably the same reason that iTunes for Windows is terrible. When a user on a competitor’s platform is using your software or website, you’d think that making it an easy and pleasant experience would be a high priority. A chance for a convert, so to speak. But apparently not something Apple is interested in.
~Max
So why didn’t you?
My boss came to the same conclusion and did it himself with a Google Sites template.
~Max
Cool. You are both very smart and industrious people. 
Qualification accepted. Never bought an Apple product, feel no need for Apple+ streaming service.
An issue I don’t think is brought up enough is something that, I think, gets under a lot of people’s nerves. Many sites, upon noticing you’re on a mobile device will make adjustments to the site to optimize it for the smaller, touchscreen, interface. Some sites, like wikipedia, even forward you to a different URL.
Why is it that sites like wiki can sense that you’re using a mobile device and forward you to a site optimized for mobile users, but when you open that same link on a non-mobile device, they don’t send you back to the regular site?
I’m sure I’m not the only person that deletes the “m.” from a wiki URL that someone linked from their phone.
I do that as well (delete the m. from a mobile Wikipedia link).
It’s not 1/2 hour. The external professional you’ve hired spent 15-30 minutes minimum just communicating with you. And that’s presuming that all requirements and content (text and images) for the site come in one initial email in exactly the right format. And, it presumes there is no expectation for any feedback/edits based on the first thing the designer submits.
They also are presumably covering not only salary but benefits and business overhead, and time spent dealing with admin and other operations with their billed hourly rate.
In order for this kind of contract work to be at all profitable, there’s a minimum hours billed amount would be at least one hour.
I’m hiring a professional to implement something one-off for my business that takes ~an hour of work? $100 is really reasonable.
The point of hiring a professional is that they’re supposed to be able to do a better job than you could do yourself.
In my experience, restaurant web sites have gotten WAY better in the past few years, largely due to the pandemic.
Even just three or four years ago restaurant pages were plagued with terrible splash pages, music (a war crime, IMO) and other bits of style over substance. If you could find a menu it was hopelessly out of date and either didn’t have prices or had “old” prices that were several dollars less than you’d find in the actual restaurant. (That was so consistent that I’m 100% certain it was deliberate in a lot of cases.)
Then the pandemic came along and every restaurant had to rely on takeout or delivery business, so most of them got their shit together and at least started keeping an accurate menu on the site. That alone made the process of looking at their sites vastly more worthwhile. In general I’ve noticed a lot more substance over “style”–you might still have to scroll through a bunch of photos and accolades to find a reservation link or address, but the browser-crashing splash pages seem to have finally gone the way of the dodo.
I’m a professional web site designer. Or at least, I have experience and training in web design going back 20 years or so, and have built a few commercial web sites. I also currently maintain an intranet site for the government agency I work at.
I’ve never been a “web designer” in the sense that it has been my title and the entirety of my job. But I’ve done it as part of my job duties, so I think that counts. And I mean coding HTML and CSS, not just clicking and dragging on a WYSIWYG.
At least in my experience, what happens is your client (whoever that is) has an idea of what they want on the site and bring it to you. They might ask you for your opinions on one thing or another, but I’ve never had someone ask me to do it all from scratch. They always have very strong opinions of what they want, and they just want it to work.
Many times I’ve asked, “Are you sure?” I’ve given concerns. I’ve offered alternatives. But many times I’ve added things I thought are stupid or kept out things I thought should be added. Your job is to make them happy.
Sometimes you’re working with someone in marketing, sometimes it’s someone from admin. But you’re not the content creator. You’re the one turning ideas into a web site.
That’s why you end up with sites that you see today. And yes, there is a lot of “copy what so-and-so is doing” which means bad habits get repeated.
The ad agency/web design shop I worked for lost our biggest client that way. We kept giving them what they WANTED instead of what they NEEDED.
My boss just wanted the retainer coming in every month (he’d even call them “our cash cow”), and didn’t care, he’d just grumble “Just take what they say and make it work somehow.”
We lost the client to a young upstart business that showed them exactly what they’d always said they didn’t want….
BUT those 30-somethings also showed them how it was what their potential customers wanted, and would bring in more business. Which it did… meanwhile, we were laying people off and scrambling to replace that client with a half dozen normal-sized ones.