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I would like to give a shout-out to a web page that not only doesn't suck, but it's very very good at doing it's primary purpose, which is to serve me pizza. The people that do papjohnsonline understand the PRIMARY purpose of their web store-front--that's to get me to the pizza that I want to order.
Now--I picked up a nasty computer virus this summer, so my Firefox has the "noscripts" plugin installed, which doesn't allow any javascript to run by default. Occasionally this means that I go to a web front page that doesn't work right, but mostly it means that I don't have dancing advertisements all the way around something that I'm trying to read. When I went to log into papajohn's, they explained with a brief note that javascript was required for their website and it seemed to be turned off. They DIDN'T do any of the following, which drive me utterly insane: - they didn't explain what javascript was or how to enable it in internet explorer - they didn't present me with a page that rendered so badly I couldn't read it
Years and years ago when I was graduate school, I ordered pizza a lot, and for various reasons my primary pizza source was Dominoe's. One Friday night, I was concentrating hard on something but I wanted something to eat that enabled me to get back to working on whatever it was as soon as possible. I dialed dominoes, still thinking about my project. None of the specials was really appealing, so I had to wrench my concentration to trying to figure out what to order. The person on the phone confirmed my phone number, from that information confirmed my address, and then said "well,the last time you ordered you ordered X and Y". That sounded good, so I just said to send me that, got the amount, wrote the check, clipped it to the mail clip by the door, and got back to my project. I thought at the time that was a totally brilliant strategy, which is what people want.
Well, ordering at papajohns, I was having the same conundrum. Wanting to order pizza but not wanting to think about it. I turned on scripting, logged in, and then went hunting around for the "favorites" menu (which they have too. Lo and behold, there's a link in the top bar that says "repeat last order". So it filled in my order, complete with all the sauces we order (but NOT tip amount).
A good lessons for those who make web pages that spend so much effort doing the secondary things (advertising new products, and so on) that they leave behind the primary thing, whatever that is.