It’s depressing, really. Talk about unclear on the concept.
I work for a newspaper. We have a website, specializing in “news” stories and blogs. The idea is you click on a story, you read it, then you click the Back button to go back to the main page, and look for any other stories you might be interested in. At least that’s the way I do it, when I am perusing our site.
Now they are running these little ads that disable the Back button. The ad consists of a small video ad that runs when you go on the page, whether you want it or not. Fine, you can ignore the video. Once the little ad is done, it offers you the choice of viewing some other news stories from other sources.
Only if you click the Back button, all it does is re-set the little video ad to run again. Doesn’t matter where it is in the cycle, the Back button completely doesn’t do what you expect.
I pointed this out and was told that they were researching the problem. Then it stopped for a bit, and I assumed they had found and fixed the problem. Today it’s back. I complained again. No response.
It’s like the morons don’t want people to use our site. They seem to be willing to throw away normal functionality to sell another ad for a few more bucks. Short-sighted twits.
Roddy
Heh. A local real estate site that I make heavy use of recently decided that the scroll ball on the mouse should no longer work to zoom in and out of the map on their main page where you look for properties. In other words, it no longer works like Google Maps, or the embedded “map this property” map links on their own site where you can place your curser on a part of the state or city and zoom in and out from there. Instead to look at overall properties you have to center on the area and zoom in with the +/- buttons on the screen, recenter of you’re off, repeat as you look at other areas.
Dumb, dumb, goddamned stupid dumb.
It was probably done because one 84 year old computer illiterate real estate maven found it too confusing and complained about it.
Yup. Rich idiots + internet = fantastically stupid demands, every time.
I’m in the late stages of a developing an ASP.NET site for a (multinational corporate) client. On end-stage review, the site was on its merry way through all the stages of approval by the client team, when the SVP Of Fuckity-Doo decides to stick his head in with this:
“Yes this looks good, but wouldn’t it be more convienient [sic] for the user if all the links on the site opened in a new window or tab? Then they could click on them without losing their place.”
Yeah, you read that right. I even responded asking for clarification in hopes that he meant something sane, but no; he wants every single hyperlink on a 100-plus-page website to open in a popup.
This is of course cosmically retarded, but nobody on the client team dares to say that to the muckety-muck, and my own company has authorized ONE appropriately polite (read: 1-to-10 content-to-cocksucking ratio) response from me pointing out to point out that accepted design best-practices disagree with this approach. (I have been explicitly forbidden to finish that sentence with “…because it is stupendously, pants-shittingly moronic.” Also, from adding a postscript of “What the hell is wrong with you?”)
Given that this site will eventually A) be publicly available and B) carry my employer’s branding as the developer and content provider, I’m going to try to convince my boss to push back harder on this so as not to make the lot of us look like drooling imbeciles. Sadly, I don’t really expect to succeed.
Sales guy: “Hey, we’ve got a conference in London next week. Please make our site #1 on Google for [extremely popular search terms] until the conference. Thanks.”
Or… I once hired an SEO agency on behalf of a company I worked for. Part of the payment was for one of the agency’s SEO monkeys to come in to my office and do the grunt work on updating the metatags etc. on about a thousand pages over the course of a couple of days, because I didn’t have enough resource in my team. The company’s network guy goes: “we need the exact name and the dates they’re coming in”. The agency couldn’t specify which of their coders would be available or on which days. So I asked for a generic agency login over the course of a week. Denied. Which was weird because I’d had a temp working on a generic temp login a month previously. Escalated my request. Denied. Escalated my request to the top. Stonewalled. Money: wasted. SEO: not as good as it could have been.
Roland Orzabal, are you able to write a sample outcome, that every link click will open a new window until “Due to technical limitations of the browser [nothing to do with the client’s idiocy], in a typical user journey this may result in more than a dozen windows being open concurrently on the user’s screen. We expect this not to conform to desired usability standards as laid out by W3C etc.” If you can’t, in these situations the best thing to do is have a mechanism for customer complaint reporting, post-installation and a nice fat pie chart showing overwhelming misery re. the client’s decision. Is there a feedback link on the pages (that opens in a new window of course).
Please don’t always blame the web developers. We try to do the right thing by the enduser, but just like in any job, sometimes you just have to give the customer what they want. Just like in retail, when a manager will eventually give in to an irate customer and make the cashier feel like shit, we also just have to give in.
Also, if the client opts for a content management system so they can update the site themselves…it can get pretty ugly. Not the WordArt, noooooo!
“Hey, fucknut, you hired me to do a job that requires a great deal of technical and creative skill. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. Would you tell a plumber how to weld a pipe? No? Then don’t insist on your inexperienced and uneducated opinions into how to make an effective website. I’ve taken your requirements into account and in my professional opinion this is the best way to do it with particular regard to SEO, the user experience, and customer and prospect perceptions of your company.”
…is what I never say to clients, but rather seethe and diss them to my friends. Everyone’s a designer and everyone’s a website builder.
Maybe I should just try saying it to their faces in future.
Speaking as someone who is nearly entirely computer illiterate, is it possible that the site works this way because they want it to? That there is a payoff to having the ad rerun? That by making it difficult to get off that page the ad is being seen more often or more completely? Is it possible that they can track how many times the ad starts and can quote this to whoever they’re selling the space to? Or even that making the reader need to reenter the main page to go to another part of the paper will give some kind of benefit? Not a long term, attract people to like the site kind of benefit, but a financial one?
This isn’t my area of expertise at all so it’s more than possible I’m off target. However, even though I have multiple issues with the ultimate intelligence of the people I work for I do find that a lot of the most no-brainer, stupid, fixable stuff that makes my job worse doesn’t get fixed because there’s an underlying purpose (often financial).
I’ve been known to tell a customer “if you knew how to do it, why are you paying us? And if you don’t believe we can do it, why are you paying us? You know, if you’re not going to let me do the job you’re paying me to do, I’d rather go home and do my laundry.”
So far I’ve gotten called undiplomatic several times, but never sent to do laundry.
I don’t think newspapers get this whole Internet thing. They sat on their hands when the whole “Napster/all content is free” thing was happening and didn’t meaningfully contribute to the debate, then they overreacted and made all their content free, and now they’re trying to backtrack and try and convince people to pay for the thing they were either getting for free or found free alternatives for. So most of them end up feeling pretty ambivalent towards developing a proper web presence, which is how we end up with things like the NYT rolling out a paywall that can be circumvented simply by erasing the latter part of the URL.
They never did. And they missed a really great opportunity.
In the old days, newspapers had 2 sides to their expenses:
they had to pay a bunch of journalists, editors, etc. to gather & write up the news.
they had to buy giant rolls of paper, big high-speed presses, fleets of delivery trucks, and herds of delivery people to get that news printed, folded, bundled & delivered to people’s doorsteps before breakfast.
Each of these was roughly 50% of their total operating cost.
Then along comes a technology that lets their customers download & print out the product themself (using a printer & ink the customer paid for themself), or read it online, or in their tablet or smart phone or reader or whatever device (also paid for by the customer). Thus pretty much eliminating reducing that whole production & delivery part of the newspaper business – and eliminating half of their operating costs.
Newspapers ought to have been able to make an absolute killing from Internet technology! Suddenly half of your operating costs are just gone. But they didn’t. Instead they waited around, did nothing, and now are in a downward death spiral. lost opportunity indeed.
I’m sure they are looking at the ad revenue, and maybe that ad’s revenue is enhanced by the way this works. As a user, I don’t care, it still sucks. As someone who depends on the economic health of this company, I think it makes no sense to drive away page viewers by sucky behavior in the interests of one (probably fickle) advertiser.
Really Not All That Bright: nope, doesn’t work. This is clearly broken.
To other posters: some newspapers do it better than others. I was formerly fairly proud of our site as it has very good numbers in terms of distinct visitors and number of click throughs and all those kinds of metrics.
t-bonham@scc.net - Exactly what opportunity did they miss? Yes, you save all that printing and distribution expense. But online advertising revenue doesn’t pay for the staff costs for producing news. That is still the case. Everyone’s such an expert; well, I lived through it. Your Monday-morning quarterbacking isn’t very good, even in hindsight.
Roddy
Do any of those sites have anything to do with news reporting? At most, they might aggregate other sites’ news. That is a very cheap activity, compared with generating original content.
Roddy
Because you, unlike Nava, apparently did get sent home to do laundry. So you got a lot of practice. So your white clothing is now EXTRA white, because all that practice made you REALLY good at it.
I’m guessing that laundry soap advertisements in Ireland don’t use “sparkling” as a descriptor for how white a shirt can get.
ETA: It always makes me uncomfortable to have to explain my jokes. Makes me think maybe I’m NOT a comedy genius.
