British Inside

An Englishman living in small town America

James Shaw

News

  • Copyright James Shaw 2004-2007

    Creative Commons License

    View James Shaw's profile on LinkedIn

Desk Apprentice

If you were Staples, the largest office supply company in the world, and you had just had an hour of prime time TV dedicated to a new product, and you had created a brand new web site to sell that product, do you think you would have put it on something a little more than a $10/month shared hosting package?

It just took me 12 minutes to load the first page of http://www.staples.com/scripts/redirects/advertisements.asp?ciid=41259&url=/apprentice - uh, no, sorry that redirects to http://www.deskapprentice.com, oops, no another redirect to http://www.staplesdeskapprentice.com/main/

Jeez, I just hope the web team behind this have a really good excuse.

Most of their prospective customers will arrive this morning. They only had one shot at this, and they blew it.

BTW, don't you just hate web sites that start in a sub-folder? If I type in www.xyz.com I want it to show me that, not www.xyz.com/main or www.xyz.com/imareallydumbwebmaster

Uh-oh, silly me. I just refreshed http://www.staplesdeskapprentice.com. Looks like another 12 minutes...

UPDATE: Morons. After all this they send you back to Staples.com (where I started, 30 minutes ago) to buy the product.

UPDATE 2: I give up. I was checking out (they force you to register first) and received this nice page. "Chalk up one more lost sale Billy"

Err.number = 424
Err.description = Object required

Posted: Friday, April 22, 2005 10:07 AM by James
Filed under:

Comments

No Comments

New Comments to this post are disabled