Letter to a webmaster

[mdlbear]

The serial numbers have been filed off to protect the guilty, but I attempted to register for a conference this morning, which resulted in the following :

The website for this year's $CONFERENCE is, without a doubt, the worst conference-registration website I have ever encountered. Period.

Let's leave aside the fact that all of the dropdown menus are screwed up (to the point of unusability) if you use Firefox's ability to set a minimum font size to make the text visible on a 1600x1200 screen. Let's ignore the fact that the main text frame (which is fixed-size) scrolls even if there's plenty of room in a 940x1010 window. Let's even ignore the fact that the registration pages for the exhibit-only pass are full-screen, simple, and easy to use, while those for the paid conference are stuck in the scrolling frame and use dropdown lists (presumably to save vertical space that doesn't need to be saved).

Let's concentrate on the three blunders that are so unbelievably boneheaded that whoever built the website ought to be fired over them:

1. Nowhere is it stated whether or not the exhibits pass also includes admission to the free portion of the conference -- which in fact is everything but the tutorials. In fact, a cursory reading would indicate that it does not.

2. The "paid" conference registration demands a credit card even if the total due is zero.

3. Many pages, including the contact page(!) are not accessible in Lynx. In fact, *none* of the links on the $LOCATION page work. Among other things, this means that BLIND PEOPLE CANNOT USE YOUR SITE AT ALL!

My confirmation number for the exhibits pass is $RANDOM_NUMBER Please do whatever it takes to make this cover the free portions of the conference as well. Then for goodness sake fix the blasted website before hundreds of other curmudgeons like me find it necessary to rake you over the coals for it.

And put somebody on the phones; you're probably going to get lots of calls over this.

I finally did get through to a human; he seemed a rather baffled by my complaints about useability. The site was apparently built by a consultant, and aimed at selling exhibit space to marketing people; allowing random individuals to actually connect and try to register was apparently not part of the original spec. Well, it's an explanation, but not an acceptable excuse.

The person I was talking to professed himself "mildly insulted" when I suggested that they should have hired somebody competent, and said "he's extremely intelligent". Sorry, intelligence and competence aren't the same thing. At all.

Fast action -- I see that, as of this morning, the registration page has been edited to fix item 1. (Item 3, accessibility, has not been fixed and I don't really expect it to.)

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

Their site sucks and he's insulted?

How importiant is $conference to you?

[mdlbear]

Normal reaction when you've made a bad decision and can't really afford to have it fixed.

Down here in the comments I don't mind mentioning that $CONFERENCE=Wescon, the IEEE's major West Coast convention and trade show. It's more important to the IEEE than to me; I usually get more out of more speciallized shows. But I've been going, on and off, for roughly thirty years and it's really sad to see how far downhill it's gone.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Obviously, $CONFERENCE is paying for websites like it's 1999.

[mdlbear]

Oddly, it's run by a nonprofit and they claim money is tight. My guess is they blew a modest pile of money on the wrong consultant rather than appealing to the membership for volunteers.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Oy. There's a tradeoff when you're working with volunteer vs. paid professionals—the volunteers do it in the margins of their life, and so things don't always get done perfectly on time. (Case in point: I'm the chair of a website subcommittee for a local nonprofit, and one former board member thinks the current website sucks—he's right—and wants it to be redone yesterday—but isn't willing to help.) On the other hand, IEEE members have a professional stake in making sure conferences happen.