Buying stuff on the Australian Web isn’t a major problem. Buying services/skills online does seem to be a problem. Very few tradespeople or small businesses appear to be using email or websites in a committed way.

Tig tog .. tables are fine for tabular information!

Yairs, but these nongs hadn’t seemed to realise that you don’t need tables to lay out a sidebar.

So I suppose it’s the general problem with economic changes. Some people invest the time and undergo the unpleasantness of mastering something new. They get the benefits. Others try to grab the benefits without changing their mindsets. They don’ t any benefit and then write it all off as hype.

Even major websites are completely retarded for disabled users, I could name a few, or even in terms of page size / loading speed / coherence of design.

I believe the worst things are the ISPs. Frequently they only want to support flat-HTML on their basic plans which is a nightmare to maintain; at best it’s PHP and maybe mysql. If you’re a small business who wants to do something slightly more advanced (and what about backing the database up?!) it’s often hard to get something done at a reasonable price.

1. Poor integration of virtual marketing forms into business structures.
2. Poor understanding by web designers of ACTUAL customer service practice
3. Poor understanding by small businesses as to what a web site does & what it can potentially do
4. Ridiculously primitive integration of ISP, host roles, design templates & customer functionality
5. Particularly for service providers, open source web programmes which do not require hosting, can be up & running in about an hour. Easy to edit, & their very basic nature prevents the page from being horribly visually cluttered as so many web pages are.

I think FDB has hit the nail on the head. People have websites and then after the initial flush, forget about them. Possibly such businesses have had so few enquiries via their websites in the initial stages, they’ve all but given up on them. In which case they ought to display their phone numbers much more prominently with a RING US message. They’re probably too understaffed and overwhelmed with day to day business operations to find it worthwhile spending much time online.

Just like that other half of the population who cannot for the life of them understand why anyone would read blogs, let alone write blog posts, there will always be people (or for our lifetimes anyway) who simply hate using computers.

NOT checked for rudimentry errors by the business itself.

I have received a call every week or so for the last 6 FUCKING YEARS for this guy Mark who works as a building and infrastructure consultant. I’ve given up emailing them about it, and their website still has the wrong number on the contacts page.