{"id":86,"date":"2007-03-16T21:26:19","date_gmt":"2007-03-16T19:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/wordpress\/?p=86"},"modified":"2007-03-16T21:26:19","modified_gmt":"2007-03-16T19:26:19","slug":"you-magazine-online-the-prius-and-the-missing-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"YOU magazine online, the Prius and the missing winners"},"content":{"rendered":"

I picked up a YOU magazine to read today. No, it wasn’t Posh: My Lonely Life in LA<\/em>, nor Glam in India but is groom a fake?<\/em> that drew me in. Rather, it was Win a R270 000 Toyota Prius – with one SMS<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Knowing that many of these SMS competitions make a profit for the company running them, I was interested to see how much they were charging for the opportunity to win a Prius. And those who know me will know I would much prefer to drive a Prius than say, the newly-launched Cadillac.<\/p>\n

The page containing details of the prize simply provided a number and code to SMS, with the small print pointing to the rules on another page. These rules didn’t indicate a price, only saying that calls will be charged at VAS (value-added-service) rates<\/em>, which means nothing to me. Elsewhere on the page though, I saw a mention that all previous prize winners were listed on the YOU magazine website<\/a>, so I thought I’d investigate further there.<\/p>\n

Wow. What a shock to see the site. It makes Neville’s most loathed site<\/a>, the SA Ministry of Intelligence<\/a>, look like Youtube<\/a> in comparison.<\/p>\n

On a checklist of bad design, it would probably carry the house. Animated gif’s, broken rendering (in Firefox at least), the two options login<\/em> and subscribe<\/em> both go to the same page (and mention you should register<\/em> first), and just general below-par design. Besides this, what concerned me more was that I could see no list of previous prize winners (even after trying various search terms).<\/p>\n

I’m sure it’s a legal requirement to display the price of a competition SMS, and I’m sure it’s, if not illegal, at least unethical to lead readers on a wild goose chase to find the supposed previous winners.<\/p>\n

Oh, and it was no surprise to see that they suffer from what Quirk<\/a> has termed Lame-Ass Syndrome<\/a> – it will not work without the www<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: bad+design<\/a> web+design<\/a> YOU+magazine<\/a> prius<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked up a YOU magazine to read today. No, it wasn’t Posh: My Lonely Life in LA, nor Glam in India but is groom a fake? that drew me in. Rather, it was Win a R270 000 Toyota Prius – with one SMS. Knowing that many of these SMS competitions make a profit for… Continue reading YOU magazine online, the Prius and the missing winners<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metal-technical","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}