shepd's Journal: Bell Canada's UGLY website

Ugggh... Bell Canada actually has popup advertising on their site. Not for other companies, mind you, just for their own stuff. Popups that ask you to buy cell phones, participate in some sort of sweepstakes, etc, etc.

Well, due to incompetent web design, their popups are pop OVERs. They actually cover up forms when you need to type things. Some of them pop up after about 5 seconds, thereby screwing up form input. So I thought I'd be nice and ask the webmaster about it...

Here's my submission (they don't give out email addresses on their site... I assume because they don't understand how to do spam filtering... probably too hard for them):

I just noticed all the new popups on your site. They are very annoying, distracting, and some of them make it impossible to fill in various fields on your forms (such as the title-less popup that covers the 'enter your phone number' section with the deceptively hard to find 'close' button when I'm looking to see if DSL is available in my region). I just wanted to let you know so you could improve your site by removing the popups.

I thought this was pretty reasonable, although sometimes I do come off a little forward.

Their reply (I've stripped it a bit for copyright reasons, and because they had a lot of marketing-speak in it) [my comments are in italics]:

I apologize that the pop-up messages on the Bell Canada site are a
source of annoyance to you. I can certainly understand your point of
view if you are not interested in this type of informational service.

How is it informational if all the info is already on your site?

The use of pop-up boxes is a common marketing practice on the world
wide web and one that Bell will continue to utilize, as the majority
of our customers want to be kept informed of new developments and
service offerings.

Uhhh, the use of popups are a way for free websites to make money. I didn't realise bell was a charity. If you need money so bad, why don't you just increase your prices? (on second thought, forget all about that) How many customers actually care about entering some really lame-ass sweepstakes that could win me about $5? ZERO.

A bunch of suggestions to use popup blockers (!!) removed. For a laugh, here's the link they provided:

http://www.4degreez.com/popupsmustdie/index.htm

I haven't replied to the message. Any suggestions?

depends what you want

[WhiteDragon]

If you just don't want to see pop-ups, use mozilla. If you want to reply, write a nice letter explainging your situation, and cc it to the head of marketing, and tell them that you wanted to get dsl from them, but their pop-over ads prevented it, so you are going to switch to their competitors.

Someone had to say it...

[Jouster]

Serves you right for living in Canadia, eh? ;),
Jouter