Rant: WTF? Why is it, that the bigger a company, the more screwed up their website navigation is?

[glenn1]

I swear that the larger the corporation, the more screwed up their websites are.... there's all sorts of pop-ups, site search tools are completely worthless, they inflict all sorts of weird flash sh!t on you, dead links galore, and the site design is generally clumsily and plain annoying to try to navigate through.

Try this experiment... try going to the corporate website for a large corporation that works in your business field, and try to navigate your way through the minefield of their site to apply for a job there, working in your current position. Chances are, it will take you a good 20 minutes to even come close to anything resembling something useful.

Whatever happened to the KISS principle of site design, and why is it that a good number of the Fortune 500 companies corporate home pages look like they were designed by some Soviet committee?

 

[MrHappyMonkey]

so true...

I was looking for some info on a Samsung DVD Drive. It took me like 15 minutes to find it since Samsumg is in EVERY SINGLE industry you can think of. Another hard to navigate one is Mitsubishi's (spelling?) site. I was looking for some pics of the Eclipse. I never even found their car division. I had to search in Google for a link.

It really is kind of a dificult to build a site like Samsung's since they are in a BUNCH of different industries.

 

[gopunk]

well, just a theory, but the larger a company, the more info it has to present, the larger the site, the harder it is to maintain and make presentable.

 

[wyvrn]

I agree. I also think because they are a big corp. that they try to make them as impressive as possible, which means you get information on 90% of what you don't care about what you have to wade through.

 

[Capn]

If you work for a big corp, try looking around your private company webpages. I can't tell you how hard it was to find anything I needed to when I worked for GE, and they wanted to do everything over the web too, ugh.

 

[fatalbert]

because they don't care about the customer

 

[BuckleDownBen]

<< well, just a theory, but the larger a company, the more info it has to present, the larger the site, the harder it is to maintain and make presentable. >>



Actually, I thin that the larger companies have more money to spend, which leads them to hring more consultants, which means more people messing up the site.

Just because there is a lot of info, doesn't mean it has to be a poor design.

 

[gopunk]

Just because there is a lot of info, doesn't mean it has to be a poor design.

i never said that... it's just harder to make a good one.

 

[Sluggo]

I just cant go to either www.intel.com or www.microsoft.com without almost having a mental breakdown, because of the crappy layouts.

 

[calpha]

Man, that is the dang truth.

I dont' even bother bookmarking M$FT anymore since they change soo often. one of the reasons that I use Anand's web site over any other is the wonderful design. Very Very easy to navigate and find your information.

I hate when I have to find something at Microsoft, especially MSDN. They throw such a marketing aspect into their site with their "imitated, but better", err, I mean new technologies, that I get pissed off in no time when looking for something.

And Intel. GAWD.