CSotD: There go them bells agin
Skip to comments
Tina's Groove hits one of my pet peeves: Businesses that put up websites and then ignore them.
This comes, as it happens, on a week when old folks and trivia buffs are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Beverly Hillbillies, which I mention because the early episodes had the Clampetts puzzling their way through their new mansion and discovering not just that it had a cee-ment pond, but also a fancy-eatin' room, complete with pot-passers and meat-stabbers.
And every oncet in a while, these bells would play in the walls, and after awhile, they figgered out that there was near always somebody at the front door when it happened.
Now, the point is, that, if instead of them bells, you had this little man who said, "You've got mail!" well, then … you get it.
Except, not being quite as quick-witted as Jethro Bodine (who, after all, was top of his class at Oxford), there are still too many businesses apparently wandering around staring at the walls, because they haven't made the connection between that little man talking and something on the computer requiring their attention.
Granted, there are people who simply get sold a bill of goods by some purported web guru who sets up a site and then promptly abandons it and them, so that, within a year or so, when it's a collection of dead links, they not only don't realize it but wouldn't be able to find their "webmaster" if they did.
Still, come on, folks. If you put a phone on the wall, answer it when it rings. If you set up a mail-order service, open the envelopes the carrier brings each day. And, if you establish a web presence, pay attention to it.
Or at least don't complain about business being down.
And the worst offenders are not all Mom and Pop operations. There's a macro side to this, too, and old-tyme comic fans will likely remember this example:
Back at the dawn of time, O Best Beloved, there were three newspapers that had "build-your-own-comics-page" features on their web sites: The San Jose Mercury News, the Houston Chronicle and the Philly News.
They were the only ones, because, after they got rolling, the syndicates all said, "Oh, wait a minute …" and declined to create any further such generous licenses.
The Philly site was always a little shaky, but the Philly papers were (and remain) in a maelstrom of organizational chaos, and, while the relatively recent dropping of the feature in Houston was a disappointment, it wasn't a huge surprise when Philly fairly quickly abandoned what had been a brilliant idea poorly carried forward.
There shouldn't have been such an excuse at the Merc, which, being the hometown paper of Silicon Valley, was a great regular stop for anyone with an interest in high tech stuff, so that, when you went there, you'd read your strips and then, most days, you'd wander around to see what else was happening.
But the Knight-Ridder chain had entered a death spiral of its own unique design, which seemed to have a lot more to do with personal eccentricities than any pressure from the burgeoning Internet of which pressure they were well-positioned to be a part.
So one day the comics site at the Merc was down, with an announcement that they were going to make their website really, really nifty and we'd see just how nifty in a little while and, oh my, but how thrilled we were going to be!
Speculation was that they were going to a paywall (this being, IIRC, just before DailyInk or Comics.com launched), and the discussion among comic fans was how much would they charge, would it be worth it and what extras might we get?
And the answer was none of the above.
K-R relaunched several (i.e., too many) weeks later with a generic one-size-fits-all chain-wide web design that offered no extras to anyone anywhere, and — in a business that relies almost entirely on service to its local community — made it very difficult to find anything, including what city or even state a particular K-R website served.
The corporate design was faceless, unnavigable and ugly, not just in comparison with the Merc's previous state-of-the-art site but in comparison with some of the most amateurish yellow-on-red, midi-tune-encrusted websites in the early days of the graphic interface.
Even more of a wonder came a while later in the chain's freefall, when it turned out that their on-line incompetence wasn't the most jaw-droppingly bizarre chapter in the soap opera. This was.
But I'm sure that, if they were still around, they'd be echoing today's Dilbert:
And now, here's your 25 minutes and 45 seconds of zen:
Comments 8
Comments are closed.