MetaChat - Dear Purveyors of goods EVERYWHERE...

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20 October 2008

Dear Purveyors of goods EVERYWHERE... →[More:]

Get with the fucking program already. If for any one of the following reasons:

- ad scripts (which at-work users may not have the option to block, thx)
- kludgy Flash animated thingies that take forfuckingever to load
- horrendously bloated full-res photos (yo, 72 dpi FTW!)
- .pdf docs (seriously? look, unless it's your complete user manual, 1997 called and they want their portable document format back)
- video, audio, or moving/bouncing/twinkling/noise-infested ANYTHING that loads without my explicit permission

... I must wait for longer than ten seconds to load your site on a fast connection, then I'm going to hit "close" or "back" and you just lost your chance to sell me something, and better yet, likely pissed me off in the bargain.

this goes for most purveyors of electronics, 99.45% of art studios/photography sites, many clothing suppliers (REI, I'm looking at YOU) and a disproportionate percentage of bicycle and ski manufacturers (I won't even get into the auto industry cos I ain't a consumer in that market, but out of sheer curiosity I tried to follow a link to the Honda Fit today, and gave up after it brought the desktop to its knees whilst attempting to load some horrendously large .avi).

I mean ffs, even Apple (purportedly the kings of hype/style over substance amirite?) "gets" it, their website loads quickly ON IE6 EVEN!!!

It's no wonder Amazon has taken over the world. Half the time it's easier to look something up via their site than through the manufacturer's own.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Kvetch Of The Day.

post by: lonefrontranger at: 17:34 | 9 comments

... oh and I also meant to say that if you violate any, all, or a combo of the above, then YOU FAIL at the internets, and additionally, you need to fire your sister's cousin's mother's next-door-neighbour who obviously both flunked out of high school web design 101, and who is also apparently hosting your site on a hamster-powered reel-to-reel server.

posted by lonefrontranger 20 October | 17:40

*cheers enthusiastically*

Oh man, do I hear you! I'd like to add one small point..

If you're going to the bother and expense of having a website, then put some f-ing information on it!! I am tired of finding sites which are full of bright shiny shit and have ZERO content. The net is about information - so don't advertise your site and your product and then put up one artsy pic of your product with no other background. Price? Suppliers? Colours? Availability? Specs??

posted by ninazer0 20 October | 18:30

*applauds wildly*

Damn, I hate PDF docs.

posted by divka 20 October | 19:51

I once visited a restaurant site that allowed you to view their menu... as a .DOC file.

Sinister.

On second though, their site is just too good not to share.

I give you:

http://www.tortillaflats.ca/

posted by loiseau 20 October | 19:55

Um... yeah. Trust me, everyone webbish knows that speed is key. Google is one of the key enforcers of this. As they crawl sites, they note how snappily they respond. Google doesn't want to show anyone any links that will be slow to click on. That would reflect poorly on Google, too, eventually. So only fast sites get the Google SEO love. This starves out the slow shit and rewards the fast.

But it is frustrating... there's still a ton of slow sites out there. It's like how computer chips get faster and faster every year but computers don't FEEL any faster than they did 5 years ago.

posted by scarabic 20 October | 20:21

I mean ffs, even Apple (purportedly the kings of hype/style over substance amirite?) "gets" it, their website loads quickly ON IE6 EVEN!!!

Apple has always "gotten" it. Back in the days before the Web, Apple had a useful, organized public FTP site for getting software updates, etc., while Microsoft's public FTP site was crap. (Back then I was doing tech support at a large organization with mixed Mac/DOS/Windows users.)

Apple's marketing may annoy, but they at least try to put some substance into their designs in regard to usability. No surprise that "doesn't load like crap" is part of their web team's requirements.

Anyway, excellent list.

REI, though, loads like a snap for me, and doesn't seem to violate your above rules. Perhaps they've improved the site?

My biggest problem with Amazon is that I don't trust many of their "associate" sellers (except used book dealers), especially the sketchy electronics dealers. It saddens me when something I want is not sold directly by Amazon.

posted by D.C. 20 October | 20:41

... computer chips get faster and faster every year but computers don't FEEL any faster than they did 5 years ago.
Yeah, what's with that? Surely we haven't added that much overhead to our applications in that time, have we? I swear that computers are getting slower and slower on the same software. Or is it just that our expectations are higher these days?

posted by dg 21 October | 03:47

eh, dg, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks coders are just not required to write as tightly/efficiently as they had to in the days of the Mac PowerPC and Pentium Nothings (pre 32-bit architecture or whatevs). There's probably some geek theorem written around the concept that "code will ~~bloat~~ expand to fill up the hardware specifications provided for it".

posted by lonefrontranger 21 October | 06:35

Restaurants who put only PDF menus on their website are just bastards.

posted by Eideteker 21 October | 13:39

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