More on bad website design

Wow. I am glad to see I am not the only engineer that has trouble with bloatware websites. I have gotten a dozen emails about my editorial on bad website design. I blogged about it here. One reader, Bob Bowker from ARINC sent along the following graphics, which are just too funny to not share with you folks. In subsequent emails it came out that this was not some joke that was circulating the Internet, Bob just went out and found a crappy site and took a couple screen-shots of it. It did not take him long to find one—he just use Google to search for the magic string, Bob writes:

Your article touched a pet peeve of mine, and very glad to see I’m not the only one. And the pontiac.com wasn’t that terribly hard to find, just Googled "Adobe Flash Player Required" and clicked Next until a mass-market name popped up in the search result URLs.

Gosh engineers are so smart, at least the ones over at ARINC. In his mail to me Bob mentioned that he used to work for HP Test and Measurement in Colorado Springs, just like former EDN editor-in-chief Steve Leibson. That there is some good DNA, I don’t care who you are. In his mail Bob made a comment about wishing we were back in the good old days of the 1990s and the Gartner Group’s web advice. I didn’t get that and Bob wrote back:

Gartner Group has been around doing IT research and advisory for a while. During the mid-90’s when at HP Test & Measurement I worked on a team that helped build the fledgling HP intranet/internet effort; we tracked Gartner’s guidance on building web sites. "Easy to navigate," "quick to content," "make it work, not whizzy" were among the things advocated at that time.

Small world, Gartner is where Steve Ohr, EETimes analog editor went to. They must have some pretty good DNA over there as well. I love Bob’s description of Gartner’s advice— “quick to content,” I like that.

http://www.pontiac.com/divisional/newsevents/news_music.jsp

I got a couple emails thanking me for pointing out how everyone should learn from Digi-Key’s website. It ticks off all their competitors when I extol Digi-Key’s virtues, but hey, for folks trying to design board-level systems there was Before Digi-Key and After Digi-Key. Everything changed. It occurred to me that Digi-Key understood that a large percentage of its customers where engineers, not purchasing agents. Lets face it, all the distributor websites are OK if you are a purchasing agent and you know the part number. The great thing about Digi-Key is that they understood that I did not know the part number, that is what I need them to help me with. So you can go in and search for a capacitor and it lets you pick all the important values and it didn’t even take them too long to put the values in the proper order, so 1000 pf came before 10 uF. Only after they helped you find all the parts that would match you design requirements did you have to worry about who made it and how much it cost. And they told you right there all on one page and even had real-time stock availability. Pontiac should buy Digi-Key just to get the web team.