I can't 'beer' with this

The Times of India group must surely have the worst website designers in the world. Their flagship newspaper's website is the most atrocious piece of virtual estate on the web - it looks worse than the sleaziest porn sites, with half-naked women, terrible headlines and content, and a billion pop ups and pop-unders to screw your browsing exerience.

Their sister publication, the Economic Times, is no better. While the content is better here, and there aren't so many pop-ups (maybe I don't notice because of the blockers I have installed) - the way they organize and present content sucks. I am no cognitive expert on user interface design, but just click here and tell me if you want to continue reading this article - 'Please beer with us'. It is an article republished from Knowledge@Wharton about how beer companies in the US are relooking at their marketing efforts - which should make for good reading. However, the way it is presented is ridiculous - this has been broken up into ELEVEN pages - so to read this article I have to click 11 times, and therefore will be bombarded with ads on each page! Is there ANYTHING more annoying than this? There should be a rule against such blatant commercialism - but who am I kidding? This is the Times Group, and they can do anything as long as it sells! But seriously, are the advertisers gaining from this? Sure, their ads are being served more times on the page, but does the user experience (which is terrible) not rub off on the brand as well? The only one benefiting from this (short-term only IMHO) is TOI, because so many clicks increase page-views and time spent on the website, therefore artificially driving up prices for ads.

The other website where articles have been broken up like this is the International Herald Tribune - but atleast they have an option to reformat the article to view it in one page.

PS: As with everything on the Web, there is a work-around. I click on the print this article link, which generates a nice one-pager article. I just move the print pop-up to the side of the screen and read the article. Hah! And you know what, just because you annoyed me, ET, I will not buy your advertiser's product (a Sky box in this case!).

Categories: Internet, marketing