WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?
Sorry for my profanity, but I am having the most frustrating time trying to place a simple order from Reebok’s web site. Apparently, they have opted to eschew standard e-tailer practice, including any of the various and free popular AJAX frameworks, and designed the majority of their site to be Flash-based.
The result of which is:
- Changing some of my address preferences merely gives me “Unknown error occured”.
- Pages take a day and a half to load.
- Submitting each form during checkout takes a day and a half as well.
- Viewing a product as a “pop-up” (in quotes because it’s a simulated flash pop-up) and then closing it will reload your last search and make you lose your place. That, and take a day and a half.
- Everything-I mean everything-has to have a very involved animation effect. Which, by the way, will cumulatively take a day and a half.
- Trying to send a message to their customer service about how crashy their web site is, itself crashes as well, after making you wait a day and a half first.
- At the end of checkout, and even after you get a goddamn order confirmation e-mail, your order still may not make it into their system.
One of my biggest grips about sites that use Flash extensively is that Flash is first and foremost a design-oriented presentation solution and simply inefficient for most web site activities. People who use Flash extensively usually are making something that doesn’t involve a lot of back-end programming functionality, like animations or movies or what-not. As a result, they tend to lack good programming habits (best practices) and testing skills, which results in slow, buggy ass burgers like this. At the end of the day, even if you put a $500,000 diamond necklace on it, a turd log is still a piece of shit.
This totally sux0rs. Simon is not happy.
P.S.-Oh, and by the way, “If you feel you have received the above information in error, please contact our Customer Service Department at {0}.” (←probably would have generated an exception in ASP.NET)