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March 4, 2005

And The Clueless Website of the Month Award Goes To...

One topic that's always fun to blog about is the way in which so many companies have managed to spend enormous amounts of money building expensive web sites and yet totally (and I mean totally) miss the real advantages that the Internet provides both to them and their customers.

Today I'm going to pass the keyboard over to my lovely wife Amber, who will regale us with a tale of her experience with one such truly clueless company. Take it away, Amber!

For the most part, readers of this blog are all pretty aware that, in general, if you have a company that sells information (or just about anything else) and you're not on the Internet, you're just asking for failure. When you see a commercial on TV or hear one on the radio or catch one in a magazine, there's ALWAYS a URL somewhere in the ad. But how many companies (especially the big fortune-500 type companies) are actually utilizing their website presence to it's full advantage? Not many...

Case in point: Prentice Hall. I recently had a run-in with this company and their tenuous grasp on how the Internet is supposed to work. Prentice Hall sells text books - and because they sell text books they assume that all of their customers must either be students or teachers. Thus, they have devised a website that is designed to (sort of) meet the needs of this particular clientele. Teachers and professors can request free desk copies through the website or they can set up blackboard-type sites that correspond with their course and the text book they're using in that course. However, if you're a regular person who's interested in buying a book, Prentice Hall is going to make it quite difficult.

Prentice Hall does offer an online catalog through which you can purchase books with a credit card (though searching this catalog is about as fun as poking your eye out) - but here's the fun part: They also offer on-line versions of their books. And since Prentice Hall publishes so many of those technical manuals (from The Guide to Javascript to numerous grammar and writing guidebooks), you'd think this would be an enormous cash-cow for their company. Just think about it: a book fully available on-line, that's searchable, has trusted and well-edited content, and is accessible through any browser as long as you have the access code. This is the future of books and publishing, after all, and here Prentice Hall is leading the pack.

Or are they? I wanted to buy on-line access to the book Quick Access Reference for Writers. They have a great e-book; you can even see a demo of it here. Seems simple enough, doesn't it? But just try to find a way to buy this ebook and you'll see how hard PH can make it. After too much time spent on-line searching for a way to buy the book, then on the phone talking to who-knows-how-many customer service reps, I've come to the conclusion that you cannot buy this product unless you are a student.

One representative finally suggested that I buy the CourseCampus card that comes with the grammar book - it's $16 and inside the card is an access code that allows you to access the online book. Of course the card had to be mailed to me - yep, that's right, they had to mail (not email) me a card with an access code printed inside. Then, once I received the card, I discovered that you could not log in to the site without a "Course ID" - in other words, no non-students welcome here. So, the bottom line is this: they have a product, I want the product, I have money to buy the product, I cannot have the product. Even if I were a student, I could only have access to the book for the duration of my course (a semester or a year); once the class ends so does my access. And, above all of the nonsense, I still can't help but come back to the fact that they mailed me the access code! In a giant, cardboard folder that probably cost $4.00 in shipping. And now that I want to return the damn thing and get a refund, they actually want me to mail it back!

So, Prentice Hall has a website and they offer on-line versions of their books - but they're not going to let you buy them! When will these companies learn what a resource they have in the Internet and just how much use they can get out of it? There are millions of customers on the Internet who are ready to do business with them - when will they be ready to do business with us?

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