Monday, November 21, 2005

Clean, Concise, and Informative

Attention amusement parks and those who design websites for them: when we come to look at your site, we have very few needs. These needs definitely include being easily able to find basic information such as price, location, discounts, nearby accommodations, and how many annoying photographers will be hanging around at the park entrance waiting to block our path and piss us off. Our needs may include wanting to see pictures of your new ride or to get a list of attractions we'd want to prioritize in case of long lines.

Our needs most certainly do not include sitting at our computer for eight hours waiting for your stupid overzealous flash animations, rollovers, bouncing figures, javascripts, banner ads, pop-ups, and MIDI renditions of Celine Dion songs to all finally load up. They also do not include spending another hour browsing through your hopelessly mangled pages looking futilely for the basic information we mentioned above.

And, while we sometimes like to peruse a park map ahead of time so as to have a plan of attack on a potentially busy day, and appreciate park websites that provide them, we'd prefer they just show us where the crap is and let us link to descriptions, instead of looking like this slow-loading monstrosity from Knott's Berry Farm.

Those who do not cater to our needs are sometimes punished by being named the Site O' the Weak. You have been warned.

--JCK