It's been some time, now, since some web-based and other on-line businesses have begun, like the feller says, "to go belly up." Apparently, once the novelty wore off, these were not the great idea that they had once seemed. Here are some of my thoughts about why that may be.
Many of these people seem to think that the mere presence of web pages is all that it takes. Never mind that potential customers may have questions or problems. If the web pages don't answer all questions, "tough!" Many commercial web sites don't even provide a means of reaching an actual human being.
Of those that do, all too many force the customer to use the brain-dead point-and-click text-editor provided by web browsers by providing only forms-based "feedback" pages instead of providing a simple e-mail address that would allow the (potential) customer to use a familiar text editor to compose the message and a preferred mail user agent (MUA) to send it.
If some means of sending e-mail, however crude, are provided, all too often, they take their good old time about responding--if they respond at all. If, finally, someone does manage to reply, it is rare for the reply to more than superficially address the questions or issues about which one had enquired. One often gets the impression that they read the first sentence and the last and try to guess what may have been between. But then that's the approach taken by modern business to paper-based letters as well, isn't it?
Then there are the web pages themselves. Too many seem to have been constructed more to show off the ability of the "web master" to use all the glitz there is than to make it easy for potential customers to navigate the pages. What a shame that the pages of the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign aren't required reading for every web master.
Many are designed to work correctly (if at all) only with the most recent and most popular web browsers. Anyone who, through necessity or through preference, does not use the latest and greatest browser or who uses something other than the "big two" is just out of luck.
As bad is the web master who fancies himself an artist and "creatively" uses bizarre color combinations. While it may be rare to find one who actually uses black text on a black background, some of the combinations actually chosen are only slightly better. Never mind that the human eye is least responsive to colors near the extremes of the visible spectrum, blue-on-black and red-on-black seem to be very popular combinations. (My aging eyes seem to prefer the more mundane dark text on a light background. Can it be that the dark ink on white paper custom originated for a reason?)
Combined with such ridiculous color schemes are fonts chosen with the assumption that the viewer is using a display with pixels the size of paving bricks. Anyone using a high-resolution monitor is out of luck--the text will all be illegible "fine print."
Not the fault of the businesses themselves is the difficulty of finding an on-line business that supplies a desired product or service with a general-purpose search engine. If anyone reading this knows of a good search engine that is specialized to locating on-line businesses able to provide a given product or service, I shall be eternally grateful if you'll let me know about it via the e-mail address below.
Perhaps this is a shortcoming of the web itself. Perhaps there is no way to distinguish between web sites that actually sell a product or service and those that only talk about it.
The search is further confounded by local businesses who put up a web page to advertise their business but who have no intention of providing their service or selling their products world-wide or even nation-wide. These pages often list the products or services available only to that business's local customers and so any search for the name of one of those products or services produces their web page--which all too often doesn't even indicate the location of the business...
Apparently, many "web masters" have no clue that the first two "W"s in WWW stand for "world wide" and that their web page will be accessible anywhere on the planet. It seems to be too much trouble for many web-site designers to say where the business is located or to indicate that the business services the local area only (where ever that may be).
In the US, for example, it's anybody's guess which state, much less which city, a given company is in. At least sometimes the URL, by way of the top-level domain (TLD), gives a clue as to the country (e.g. .uk for the United Kingdom). But even that doesn't always work; apparently, there are .com sites all over the world.
I guess that common sense truly is dead when on-line businesses assume that they need not bother trying to communicate useful information to potential customers but, instead, only to put up a web page that may be viewable only on s select few web browsers and that all too often is either illegible or is so full of fancy graphics that it takes five minutes to load and that customers will gladly tolerate this nonsense for the privilege and honor of being permitted to send their money to this company.
Send feedback to crs at swcp.com