Archive for April 2008

This will likely be fixed in no time, but the irony was too much to ignore.

Jakob Nielsen released his Alertbox just a few moments ago, implying in the summary that, of all the bad design decisions a company can make, those around content are the most costly:

Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Intrigued, I followed the link, only to find this:

So not being able to even see the content… does that fall anywhere near the “bad content” end of the spectrum?

A bit of investigation reveals that the entire Alertbox subdomain is somehow restricted in its access. Hopefully this issue isn’t too costly for him.

I so called this one.

So I’m walking out the door today, and as I go to turn off the TV, I see the e*Trade talking baby commercial. Just before I turn it off, I heard something that didn’t jive with what I had heard the 10 times I added the video to my last blog post (yes, I obsess at times).

I step back and play the commercial again, and sure enough: eTrade is now advertising savings accounts that earn six times the national average – down from their initial claim 8x. It turns out that the national average isn’t actually falling; eTrade just couldn’t sustain their initial promise. There aren’t any online videos with this updated version yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.

This makes me even less likely to sign up for an account with them. In two more months, will it be four times the national average? Or perhaps they’ll aim for the top of the bell curve. Either way, it won’t be with my money.

Yes, I know it’s been a couple weeks. It’s actually been a big couple of weeks, but more on recent developments coming soon. In the meantime, my 12 half-written blog posts were giving me the evil eye, so yet again, I’ve returned to my neglected blog.

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