The Daily Sucker

I entered the following into Amazon’s search box: How Can I Talk If My Lips Won’t Move. Amazon said:

Your search “How Can I Talk If My Lips Won’t Move: ” did not match any products.

The only mistake I made consisted of one letter — Don’t instead of Won’t. I’m sorry, but that’s just unacceptable. I tried the same search at Barnes & Noble and Powell’s, but they couldn’t find the book. Oh, Borders gets it right. Why did I search for the title? I couldn’t remember the author’s name: Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay.

BTW, it’s a great book about what it’s like to be autistic.

Submitter comments: Even in 2000 this would have been considered bad web design. (IE4.0? Really?)

Recently the subject of a few blogs in regarding poor customer service emails plus newspaper coverage.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I think I read in some web design book that the type of design this site is using is the 1996 porn site look.

Obviously, the site hasn’t changed since Christmas/New Year’s — but the question is, “Christmas/New Year’s of what year?”

It’s a shame that such a beautiful country has such an ugly web site. They need to hire someone to redesign the site.

Gourmet Food Store

Here’s an email I recently received from the folks at iStockphoto:

This message is a friendly reminder to you that iStockphoto credits expire within 1 year of the date of purchase. You have credits in your account that will expire in the next 30 days if not used:

Acquisition Type: Normal Purchase
Expiration Date: 2008-04-23 00:00:00
Credits Expiring: 14

Oh. And the email came from iStockphoto [do_not_reply@istockphoto.com] so I can’t even reply to the message.

The #1 mistake in Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 is believing people care about your web site. Your visitors aren’t interested in your needs (maximizing revenue by expiring people’s credits) but in using their credits when they actually need to download photos.

In the article I also said “The only reason your web site exists is to solve your customers’ problems.” Dear iStockphoto: Thank you so very much by adding to my problems. Now I have to download photos I may or may not need just so I don’t piss away my $14.

I used to like iStockphoto a lot, but now I can’t recommend their service.