You know it’s that time of the year.
The time when I’m getting the November blues, or I’m getting too stressed, or I’m on PMS or whatever. The “Why Greek sites suck” saga is here.
Since I was recently on the market for a used car, I turned to the one medium that feels easier to me, which is of course the mighty interwebs. The Boyfriend suggested that I should check out the Autotriti.gr site, that is a site of greek driving magazine, that supposedly features a full-scale gallery of used cars, along with a convenient search form.
And so I did – mind you, I only wanted to check prices according to the criteria I had set.
First of all, in my teeny tiny (well, not THAT much) 13” Macbook screen, truth is, you really cannot see much in their frontpage, apart maybe huge ugly ads and pointless ugly imagery.
Hovering the menu items hides its text in Safari – classy.
So I decide to conduct an advanced research, woe is me. But wait – my page has gone all the way to the right (from all the way to the left, plus, half of my page is conquered by an ugly ad which I cannot turn off, with sound which is default on to top it off.
As you can see, to see the content I have to scroll horizontally. What were these people thinking, really (apart from the advertising money).
Ok then, to the search. You think this form looks too simple? Wait till you see that:
You know how I did that? By selecting an option one page at a time. That means, in the first page, I select the brand, phoosh, refresh, I have to select a model, phoosh, refresh, I have to select the cc, et cetera. Really, you have to try it to believe it. And of course, restarting the search procedure does not work.
On a geekier note, each and every one of the search terms is passed in the query string as a GET variable. That means over 20 vars up there, after a while. *sigh*
I don’t know how these sites have users. I cannot possibly understand how. Am I too strict? Maybe. Will I ever be close to the naive user webmaster? Never.
11 comments on this post
John Tsevdos #1
16.Nov.07
Hilarious! And it’s one of the biggest car-related sites in Greece! Lord save us!
Svelon #2
16.Nov.07
When advertising money talks, usability shuts up. For good.
menneke #3
16.Nov.07
Ha! I tried that site 3 years ago when I had just arrived in Iraklio, also looking for a second had car. A colleague of mine suggested I ‘d use that site. Needles to ay, after some frustrating minutes I swore I would never return to it! Nothing much has changed since then or so t seems…
Titanas #4
16.Nov.07
Bad thing about it… people still pay to get their ads on the site which means a) people are stupid and click on those ads b) doesn’t matter if people are stupid because everybody is stupid
This is so freaking sad…
Svelon #5
16.Nov.07
What happened to my comment?
Sugar #6
16.Nov.07
@Svelon: Sorry for that, you were filed up as spam, once again.
Mark #7
16.Nov.07
Greek sites suck because like everything else in Greece, they are usually only in Greek. You may think that make sense, until you try a typical Swiss site that is in 4 languages, including English.
ilias #8
16.Nov.07
Seems that you chose the worst greek car magazine and its website .
They must be the most biased ones – I have sent them several
e-mails about different issues but they chose to ignore them ,
as they contradicted their positions . The sad thing is that a lot
of people still read it – but then again , stupid people are entitled
to their magazine .Thanks for the chance you gave me to say
something about them .
Lesbia #9
16.Nov.07
Aren’t women supposed to be looking for food recipes instead of cars, let alone driving them.
Sugar #10
16.Nov.07
@Lesbia
Aren’t men that pretend to be lesbians supposed to be searching for porn or something instead of commenting on blogs?
Nikos #11
16.Nov.07
What do you think of http://www.autodealer.gr for used cars? i’d say it’s a cleaner market for used cars, maybe you should give it a chance… greek sites are trying to re-design to enter the post-2000 internet age