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[pmcd9]

Or even better, use mySQL.  Fuck Microsoft.

[wombat]

So many companies do not list any personnel on their website. Horrific. Some even say "contact HR to apply" but don't list any contact information for HR.

Some of them do this on purpose to weed out people who won't make an effort to get the information.

[miles]

Some of them do this on purpose to weed out people who won't make an effort to get the information.

Is that the goal of restaurant websites that bury their hours deeper than Jimmy Hoffa?

[wombat]

Oh god, restaurant websites. Is there any other industry that has so many different totally misguided ideas about websites?

[greenkoolayd]

Oh god, restaurant websites. Is there any other industry that has so many different totally misguided ideas about websites?

i think they are more misguided about what the customer wants and less so about web design, in general.

[miles]

I get what you're saying, but shouldn't business web design be functional, primarily? And the primary function should be efficiently and effectively presenting information to customers.

[pmcd9]

I get what you're saying, but shouldn't business web design be functional, primarily? And the primary function should be efficiently and effectively presenting information to customers.

One would think, but restaurants tend to use their wife's retarded brother or whatever to do their web design.  I think there is a general perception that building websites is easy.  But it's like a lot of things in that it's easy to do really really badly.  Doing it well is a little more challenging.  So restaurants, especially restaurants running on a shoestring budget, tend to let that general perception guide their decision making and hand the job over to an amateur with little knowledge of coding an even less about design and functionality.

[wombat]

But even the ones who obviously have money are awful - it's just at the other extreme, with everything animated and popping up in weird ways and making music and all kinds of fancy shit that just gets in the way. We just want to look at the menu and know the hours, OK?

[CortJstr]

But even the ones who obviously have money are awful - it's just at the other extreme, with everything animated and popping up in weird ways and making music and all kinds of fancy shit that just gets in the way. We just want to look at the menu and know the hours, OK?

There was just a story in Slate about this (did somebody link to it already?) guessing that the fancy restaurants think that we want the same atmosphere and feeling of hospitality and being entertained on the site that we do in the actual restaurant. Clearly these people have their heads up their asses.

Additional random complaint: our IT people just switched our internal e-mail system so that everything is last, first because it's the "industry standard."

[jay-ell]

Mail merge for form letters?  (Access is better than Excel at this too).

Yes, that's exactly what we used it for at Gigantic Soulless Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Also, sometimes we only wanted to send something to the people in one state, or one region. I worked in Professional & State Gov't Affairs, which is where the salesmen and lobbyists were. So sometimes we wanted to send stuff to all the doctors in Kentucky, and sometimes we'd need to send something to the legislative members of Minnesota. Sometimes we wanted to send info (as for a conference) to everyone in the Southeast. For that, we needed to be able to sort and subdivide, so we had fields that never showed up in the address, like job titles and region codes. Having it in a database -- and we had thousands and thousands of records -- made it much, much easier. This is the intended use of Access and the mail merge feature in Word, and when used correctly, it's very effective.

There is no reason to use Access for any less than 100 addresses, and even then it's stupid unless you regularly send mailings to various subsets of the whole.

[wombat]

Well these are rather disturbing answers now that I think of it. I am afraid what this means is that they are going to add the addresses I sent them to their database and pester them with publicity for other books.

[Nabubrush]

(T)he fancy restaurants think that we want the same atmosphere and feeling of hospitality hostility and being entertained on the site that we do in the actual restaurant.

Speaking of inviting websites, the Missus got a promotion at work, and as such has new business cards coming. She asked me to order her a card holder from this website. I basically have to tell her that I can't condone this sort of thing.

[miles]

"industry standard."

Where I work, this is code for "how the fuck am I supposed to know?" Or, "one of our competitors did it and it saved them a few bucks. I know it sucks but they did it first!" The second one is when we explain a change to customers.

[side_show]

...frantically call a bunch of cabins trying to find one to rent last minute.

[lprkn]

Additional random complaint: our IT people just switched our internal e-mail system so that everything is last, first because it's the "industry standard."

Makes sense if you work for a large organization, less so if you don't.