Vincent Flanders’ comments: When you’re young, you talk about the drugs you take. When you’re old, you talk about the medicine you’re taking. Once of the problems with taking medicine when you’re older is that you forget whether you’ve taken your pills or not — especially when you take several different medicines.

King 5 TV ran a news story about a new type of medicine cap that tells you how long it’s been since you’ve opened that particular medicine. They mentioned that local drug store chain (Bartell Drugs) would have the product available and that it was available from the manufacturer.

I looked at a lot of pages at Bartell’s site , but couldn’t find a search engine. Using the Google Toolbar, I searched the site, but only found one link and the link wasn’t helpful.

When I went to RX Timer Cap’s web site (the manufacturer of the product) and clicked the Buy button, I was greeted with the message “Page Under Development.”

Holy Mother of God. Do these morons realize how frustrating this is? I want your product but you won’t let me order it.

Obviously, there will come the day when they solve this problem (I hope). Here’s a video to memorialize the fact they’re Unclear on the Concept.

RX Timer Cap

I’ve got pneumonia. ‘Nuff said.

Xerox

Submitter’s comments: There are too many web sites I can’t really read because the text isn’t dark enough. I’m older (63) with some eye problems, but I spend large sums of money on products for my company that I research on the web. I’d at least like to be able to read about what I’m buying. I find Xerox’s home page difficult to read. If you mouse over the “Document Outsourcing” link at the top, you get black text on a dark purple background.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The harder it is to read a web page the easier it becomes for your visitors to hit the BACK button and go to a site they can read. In order to read a web page, you need enough contrast between the text color and the background color. This isn’t rocket science. I’ll even  give you a simple guide that shows which shades of black to use for text on a white background.

Why do designers do that voodoo that they do so well? In an article entitled, Has Your Web Designer Ever Heard of Contrast? a plausible explanation is given:

The reason is… gray text looks better and more coherentwhen seen from a distance or as an element of the overall design, but, and this is a big but, it is not meant to be read in these cases…

…Unfortunately, some visual designers sacrifice readability for a slight increase in visual appeal because they do not really read the text on screen; they treat it as a large block of horizontal lines, and the darker those lines are the uglier they look. So, decreasing the contrast a little makes the overall design look nicer but less readable. Poor readability is not the designer’s problem. After all, he will probably never try to use the site he designed.

I noted that a recent Daily Sucker, TechSoup, was using #666 for some of their text, which made it difficult to read. I noticed that today’s sucker, Xerox, also uses #666 for sections of their text. As the submitter mentioned, mousing over the “Document Outsourcing” link is not pleasant. It gets worse. The Xerox for Small and Medium Businesses page adds hard-to-read link colors.

It seemed to me like important web sites were all conspiring at the same time. Perhaps I felt this way because A&E and the History Channel have been running shows about the end of the world with predictions from Nostradamus, the Aztecs, and everybody and his brother and watched too many of them (I’m not watching anything political.)

Then it hit me. The number 666 is the Number of the Beast. This is all coming to me as a revelation on…9-9-9, which is “666″ inverted. Yes, Nostraflanders has uncovered a plot on this special day to ruin web sites. #666 is Satan’s CSS! If you don’t believe me, look at the photo above. This is proof!

In the movie The Usual Suspects, the character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

At Web Pages That Suck, Nostraflanders says, “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing web designers the people could read text colored #666.”

Xerox

Sonic

Submitter’s comments: Avid reader here. I was hungry and looking for something to eat for lunch. I wandered on over to sonicdrivein.com and was amazed at how crappy the web site was.

First off, it takes a long time to load. Let’s face it, if I’m looking up food on the internet, chances are I’m hungry and don’t want to sit there and waste precious time waiting for a page to load.

The site has a lot of Flash stuff and those two annoying guys on the commercials pop up and basically nag you to death while you are deciding what to do. I hate sites that talk to you.

The background on the site is a large picture, which makes it hard to distinguish other page elements. If you click on the “explore menu” a big menu comes up and you move it around with your cursor. I tried it for a few seconds and got a headache. There is an option for the “quick view” menu, if you can find the tab at the top of the page. The contrast of the text against the red headers is terrible.

There is just way too many cutesy, gimmicky things on this site for my taste. I think restaurants should be pretty straight-forward in their web presentations. This is who we are, this is what we have for you to eat, and this is when we are open. That’s pretty much all I want to see.

Thanks for giving me something to read and laugh at everyday.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The site is even worse if you have a large portrait monitor. Flash, of course, fills up the window. In general, that’s a good idea and one of the reasons people use Flash, but on my monitor the home page sucks. Oh, and this particular screen (they rotate) scared the bejesus out of me.

With its horizontal scrolling, the Flash menu page is out of control. The site also has Mystery Meat Navigation, and Mystery Meat is the last thing you want to see at a restaurant. Well, I suspect the last thing you want to see is a Health Inspector shaking his head in disgust. Speaking of Health Inspectors, here’s a report on my favorite eating spot in Bellevue, Washington — Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Oops.

Sonic

I’m actually a really nice person, but I’m getting really, really upset that some web sites can’t handle simple typos. I went to Pollstar to find out if the Drive By Truckers were playing anywhere near me. In the search box I quickly typed “Drive By Truckersd” and hit the ENTER key before I realized my fingers had accidentally hit the “d” key. Here’s the screenshot of what resulted.

C’mon, geniuses. I got every letter right except the last one. How hard is it to figure out what I wanted. What about people who type “Drive Bye Truhkers?” Yes, I’m stupid for making a mistake, but you didn’t keep my original search term in the search box. If you did, I could just go up and hit backspace to erase the “d” and then hit enter and get my results.

Amazon knows how to handle my mistake. The clowns at Pollstar don’t.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I ran across an interesting blog post concerning web design. The article’s title, Hey, did you want to try Netflix? How about while you’re already using Netflix? tells you all you really need to know. These are the types of usability issues that just drive you crazy.

I’m working on a post about an even worse experience. I get most of my prescriptions online because I get more pills for less money. I recently went online, ordered some medicine, went through all the steps, and at the end of the process I discover — via some small text — that they won’t let me buy the medicine because my prescription had lapsed. IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LET ME BUY SOMETHING, DON’T LET ME ORDER IT! I’m still upset.

Site: Collecta

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I was reading an article about real-time search engines and one of the sites mentioned was Collecta. I went to the site, but it gave me a message that said I couldn’t use the site because I was using Internet Explorer 6. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This screen capture shows the message Collecta gave me and the message I received when I went to What’s My User Agent? that says I’m using IE7.

This example shows that browser sniffing techniques aren’t always up to snuff. Hopefully, Collecta isn’t using some expensive browser-sniffing program, but is relying on a college CS major who’s interning for the summer. Still, this kind of mistake is soooooooo amateur.

Collecta

http://harvard.edu/ doesn’t work

http://www.harvard.edu/ works

In case Harvard fixes it, here’s a screenshot,

I suggest that Amazon.com stop making stupid suggestions.

Amazon.com’s suggestions about books “I might like to know about” is about as accurate as my suggestions about etiquette at a formal dinner.

On March 30, 2000, I purchased Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course by John B. Kwee because my daughter was going to Kalimantan (Borneo) to work with the now-famous Lone Droscher-Nielson at her Orangutan preserve. On Sunday I get the following email (emphasis is mine):

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated “Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course” by John B. Kwee, you might like to know that “Spoken World: Polish” will be released on April 28, 2009. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $18.50 by following the link below.

You’ve got to be fricking kidding me. Anyone with an IQ higher than an ice cube knows there is zero chance an American who wants to learn Indonesian will also ever want to learn Polish. Zero. Absolute Zero. Yeah, yeah. I know they’re using senseless bots to send out the messages, but it’s still aggravating.

A side note: The Wrestler is out on DVD today. Great movie.