We Depricate Your Business!

I have an old timey cellular phone. It’s not in a bag, but it doesn’t have a camera, Web browsing capability, or the ability to receive pictures.

Which means when someone sends me a picture, I get a message that I should go to a computer and follow the instructions to see my pix or my flix:


My text message
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All right, I got to a computer and enter that URL, all prepared to follow instructions and, frankly, fearing what picture might await:


The URL specified in the text message
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And I press ENTER to find:


Page not found!
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Great. They changed the Web site, but not the automated text message.

It’s a lot to keep in mind, every reference to every URL your site has used. Instead of keeping track that way, wouldn’t it be easier to just use redirects in this case? That way, your non-iPhone using customers (which would be all of them, hey, Verizon?) can still use your system.

After 30 minutes on the phone with tech support, I could navigate through the busy and slow Verizon Web site to find a picture of….. lilies. Lilies I planted at my former and yet unsold home in St. Louis, Missouri. The lilies are doing very well. Better than Verizon’s Web site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 6:58 am by The Director and is filed under Failed Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “We Depricate Your Business!”

  1. jstrazzere Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 8:56 am

    I’m guessing this is because the text displayed in your phone (“www.vzw.com/new-pix-flix-message”) isn’t the complete URL.

    For example, it doesn’t include any query strings, nor any way to identify the picture to be displayed.

    I’m guessing that the actual URL is a bit more involved than the human-readable text they display. Just typing what you see isn’t likely to work.

  2. The Director Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 9:46 am

    See, I would guess that this URL was complete at one time and led to a login page, wherein the user would apply his credentials and see a list of his or her messages. It wouldn’t make much sense to include a lot of extras on the querystring and expect someone to type in a bunch of parameters.

    Regardless of our forensic speculations, it’s broken. And my alluded to lesson still applies: Lilies take a couple of years to really hit their stride.