Website design
 

I had such a good experience on our sponsor's website today, that I had to share. This is probably old news, to most of you, but it was really refreshing.

I HATED trying to buy basic maintenance items for my 911 because in the past many web designs make it so hard. Looking through engine parts for drain plug gaskets, etc.

The current design has a section for maintenance items. Click on one item and it gives you recommendations for similar parts, that you need to do an oil change. On a 993, that is two oil filters, one O ring and a washer.

Checking out was even easier- it let me edit items in the cart, knew who I was because I went to the catalog from this forum, and then when paying, let me pay with Paypal so I didn't have to go searching for my wallet.

What frustrates you with website design? Things getting better overall or are some companies just lazy?

Hi Chuck - thank you very much for the kind words. Really happy to hear that you had such a great experience - we're always working on improvements to make it as direct and easy for our customers as possible.

Years ago I was phased out as our companies Web Designer. I was all about making it as easy and straight forward as possible for customers to find what they were interested in, the tech info on it, and ordering what they need. It looked good, clean, and modern, BUT no distracting froo froo or marketing BS. They thought the site needed to be more entertaining. My idea is that people come to our site for the products, not to be entertained.

I now manage our Active Directory, Servers, and Email. The customers complain things are too difficult to find on our web site. Web designers respond by adding more distracting marketing BS in the name of customer education. Sure glad I am not involved in that any more.

Insisting on me using an app when using the browser in my phone.

Clients thinking they know better than the person they are paying (I do back end, not make it look pretty)

Graphic designers who I'm subcontracting the "make it look good" part to who think they know better than I do ... and change my code... and don't comment the change or tell me about it.

Slow ad servers, or even worse are ad servers that get hacked and serve malicious content.

Sites that are designed to only work in one browser (I'm looking at you corporate intranet webapps!)