My favorite example is usps.com which I and 99% of other people go to for one reason alone and that is to check our tracking or delivery confirmation numbers, it should be the primary focus of the site.
The site used to be lightning fast to load on any internet connection no matter how slow and was a model of functional minimalism much like google used to be, and worked in any browser even the picky obscure ones for portable devices.
Then they redesigned it…
Now the front page is crammed with pictures of smiling people trying to sell me postal service crap, oh a overpriced t shirt just what I need! The dumb pics start scrolling while the site is still loading, good priorities there.
Now the tracking number search is done using javascript or something, whatever it is you have to wait til the site is loaded fully which can often take 30-60 seconds or even more on my shitty line of sight wireless connection. I sit there having to hit refresh, then the text is not easily copy and pastable(unless you click a second link).
Not to mention the site is no longer compatible with all browsers, the PSP web browser for one chokes on the site as being too large in size.:mad: Other obscure browsers no longer load this monster.
Good job USPS! Good job!
Well if like me you’d like a link to the old style website for checking the tracking#s every day and are annoyed at the redesign go here and add it to bookmarks or favorites:
And tracking numbers are one of the best reasons to use Firefox’s smart keywords so you can just type “usps ###########” in the address bar and not have to do all the rest of that stuff. Chrome’s equivalent is the custom search engines function.
I realize that it’s not intended to be “useful,” but the Onion has degenerated into a complete scattershot mess, impossible to find anything, just a complete clusterfuck.
The problem with that is that menus are not static documents, but HTML is not usually a skill of the restauranteur. But it’s very easy for them to make a new PDF and upload it over the old PDF as their menu changes instead of paying someone to update the HTML with the changes. It’s also more timely - even if you can afford it, can the Web guy get around to doing it before the menu differences cause a problem?
Having an easily-updated menu online as part of a CMS is nice if the restaurant can afford it, but most can’t. Or won’t.
So don’t begrudge the restaurant owners their PDF menus. Be glad their is a Web site and a menu at all and not just an entry on Yelp.
Wordpress is free, and makes this sort of thing so easy that even a restauranteur could do it. Set up a page for your menu (or a separate page for each section of your menu - appetizers, entrees, desserts, wine, etc.), and then just make changes to the page whenever your menu changes.
CMSes like Joomla and Drupal have a steeper learning curve than Wordpress, but even they would make it incredibly easy for a restaurant to have an HTML-based menu on its website.
Wordpress also has a plugin that allows you to create PDFs from blog posts or static pages, which would give you the best of both worlds - HTML and PDF menus.
A certain major web portal that begins with Y and ends with ! has recently re-designed their e-mail service. There was a thread here not long ago, full of posts complaining about it.
A certain nation-wide telecom company best known by a three-letter abbreviation that begins with A and ends with T recently re-designed their web site. It no longer works with my browser (an older Firefox version).
Users might not want to have to update their browsers every week just because some company like that just has to release a new web page that depends on all the latest HTML whizbangs. It worked just fine the way it was! Please, just leave bad enough alone!
Ironically, that website looks like it was designed in 1992 and most of it doesn’t work for me because because all the features use Flash. I thought it was some hipster college kid who was being snarky. Instead, the guy purports to know what a website is supposed to look like. IOW, it’s a website that sucks.
www.target.com. It’s an unholy abomination. Don’t you dare mouse over anything on their screen, or it will fill up with pages and pages of submenus. Don’t try to look at somebody’s registry online, it will only load three items until you scroll down, then it will load three more. Scroll down, three more. Scroll down, three more. FUCK ME THERE ARE OVER 100 ITEMS ON THIS GODDAMN REGISTRY JUST LOAD THEM ALL ON ONE FUCKING PAGE AAAAAHHHHHHHH
My web-based Outlook has suddenly changed appearance. Instead of looking like the Outlook app, it’s all big font dumb-looking clutter. It’s possible that I changed a personal setting, but I doubt it. I now loathe it.
Without posting a URL, my bank recently changed its webpage and IIMHO it’s horrible. What used to be a straightforward menu driven webpage is now a “hunt for it until you find it sort of thing.” I hate it.
Every single Gawker Media site since the redesign in 2011. In a regular browser it’s bad enough, since URLs from older content are now broken. Search through Google, Bing, or any other external service is now unreliable and the internal search is shit. Mobile access “helpfully” redirects to the mobile front page — no matter what URL you followed to get there. So search on an iPhone to get a relevant result that (hopefully) will still get you to a page with the terms you wanted…and you land on the top page of the site, not the page you wanted to navigate directly to.
Even worse, it sniffs IP addresses and redirects to a local version of the site. If I wanted to go to Kotaku Japan, I would: 1) Be an idiot, since Kotaku is essentially translations of Japanese press with additional reporting and commentary; and 2) I WOULD HAVE FUCKING SEARCHED FOR THE JAPANESE SITE, NOT THE ENGLISH ONE. Ninety-nine point-something percent of Japanese people do not start searching on the English version of Google. Actually probably 60% or more don’t search on Google at all, but Yahoo Japan.
So anyway, any Gawker Media sites are virtually unusable for me. What little browsing I did there is now cut to direct links from other people on articles that might be interesting. Those (mostly) work, but I don’t bother to try looking for anything myself anymore. And I’m apparently not alone in thinking that the redesign sucks, though no one else seems to have my level of annoyance with it.
I’m now officially a luddite!