Dear Rogers
I came to your site after spending over an hour speaking to people at Sympatico support. I was highly motivated to go with a competitor but your site made me question my motivation. Sorry to say, your site is even worse than Videotron.
You’ve done so many things wrong that I just had to make a list:
1) Don’t ask me what language I want.
My browser already tells you that.
2) Don’t ask me if I’m a business or a consummer.
Your site should be able to catter to both easily from the same page or offer a link to that effect on the page.
3) Pay a real graphic artist to make you a site template.
Your site is the ugliest one I’ve seen in this millenium, except for Myspace. Images are blurry, blocky and/or grainy. It’s disapointing for a tech company to have this window to the internet. I’d expect you put more emphasis on how your Internet image looks.
4) Consider text links instead of images
We’ve already established that your graphics were an eye-sore. The links you have on the navigation of your real home page are worst yet because they differ from the user’s normal fonts, take longer to download and cannot be resized for usability reasons.
5) Test your site before going live
From boutiquerogers.com I clicked on “Services Internet”, there I was given ugly flash animations with blocky images instead of a well laid out description of each package. I decided to click on each to see what they each meant but I arrived on a page that perhaps your programmer’s could fix: http://www.boutiquerogers.com/store/cable/internetcontent/express.asp<%=justSID%>
I honestly think you guys can do better.
on November 10th, 2007 at 12:13 am
I’m curious, what problems were you having with Sympatico in particular? Your phone number is in Montreal, so for you to be considering Rogers, I assume you had the Sympatico wireless service (Rogers co-built the network with Sympatico, and it’s the only internet service Rogers offers in Montreal)
If you don’t mind being stuck on a wired connection, you may want to consider TekSavvy, their rates are quite good (30 bucks for a 200 gig cap, 40 for unlimited), and their rating on dslreports puts them as the highest rated DSL ISP in North America.
I’ll avoid directly linking to teksavvy’s website in case there’s some sort of spam filtering going on here, but if you google for it, they’ll be the first few results.
I’ll agree with you on Rogers site design, though. Curious as to their prices (not that they offer cable internet in Montreal), I went to their site and selected the “express” cable internet package. And then I couldn’t find a bloody link on where I could order the darned thing. I looked for five minutes and gave up. Couldn’t find a way to actually order their service :P
on November 10th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I fully agree with you on this, The rogers site is one of the worst corporate sites i have ever used. the usability and accessibility of the site are really shocking. The part about it is the rogers web team is pretty massive.
I got sent link to their new site a few days ago and to be honest its a much needed improvement on the old site, but there is still loads which needs to be addressed. have a look here http://new.rogers.com
I’m not to sure why but there seems to be very few strong consumer based websites in Canada. Most business’ over here seem to treat the web as an test bed market rather than a way of delivering services and information to customers cheaply and effectively. My favorite example is Amazon.ca which seems to of been forgotten when compared to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.