It's quite ironic that just this week my e-marketing lecture included a section on how stupid [yes, not bad management or poor design - STUPID] it is to design websites that require software that not ALL users have - and up popped an example.
But this story gets worse - this is the 'above the fold' view of the website that was on my screen. So I thought 'something is amiss here' and noticed that the page had room to scroll down [the red arrow is my addition].
So I scrolled down a bit and got this message
As I have said before on this blog [and a thousand times in classes/seminars etc I do not have administrator access to my 'work' computer - it's very common in the workplace] so I cannot download 'adobe Flash Player 10'.
So guess what, you people at academia.edu that were responsible for this stupidity - all that work you did to publicise the site to such an extent that it came up on my radar - it was wasted.
Might your website have been useful to me? Don't know. Might I have made a meaningful contribution to the site? Don't know. Might I have added a link from my website and advised students to access it for its content? Don't know. And do you know what - we will never know.
Oh and by the way you will see a spike on your site visitors from the UK this week as I will be telling all my students to take a look at an example of online stupidity. And finally, talking of looking at your site's metrics - I assume you don't need to be told that all of those visits [and how many others?] will show up as 'bounces' from your front page ... because you have locked the door.
See also previous comments on the subject in this blog - 1 & 2.
But this story gets worse - this is the 'above the fold' view of the website that was on my screen. So I thought 'something is amiss here' and noticed that the page had room to scroll down [the red arrow is my addition].
So I scrolled down a bit and got this message
As I have said before on this blog [and a thousand times in classes/seminars etc I do not have administrator access to my 'work' computer - it's very common in the workplace] so I cannot download 'adobe Flash Player 10'.So guess what, you people at academia.edu that were responsible for this stupidity - all that work you did to publicise the site to such an extent that it came up on my radar - it was wasted.
Might your website have been useful to me? Don't know. Might I have made a meaningful contribution to the site? Don't know. Might I have added a link from my website and advised students to access it for its content? Don't know. And do you know what - we will never know.
Oh and by the way you will see a spike on your site visitors from the UK this week as I will be telling all my students to take a look at an example of online stupidity. And finally, talking of looking at your site's metrics - I assume you don't need to be told that all of those visits [and how many others?] will show up as 'bounces' from your front page ... because you have locked the door.
See also previous comments on the subject in this blog - 1 & 2.
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