Guinness blog down
Oops. I go to the Guinness blog this morning to check how it is doing and take a screenshot for a presentation, and the landing page is there, but clicking on it gives you a 404 error.
Looking at that landing page again I worry about how many users are going to get beyond this page (technical failures aside). It would be friendlier to offer some kind of content upfront perhaps short extracts from the Guinness book of records or other Guinness-owned collateral. Then you could ask site users to accept the Terms and Conditions of the site to go further (including age stipulations) and activate your cookie to make sure they never saw the page again.
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April 28th, 2006 at 3:33 am
Mark I’m surprised that you’ve made such inaccurate comments in this post given your experience. Outside of the any technical failures (which I agree are pretty poor in this day and age), the other stuff you’ve written is wrong. They’ve made it pretty clear that they’re not allowed to provide any content until they’ve verified your age so your idea of providing some content on this landing page is just not feasible. And as for cookies - this site does remember if you’ve entered these details previousy - I only had to fill them in once and never again since.
I agree the whole ‘landing page’ thing is pretty stupid (as it’s easy to circumnavigate) - but I’m guessing that they do this kind of thing only because they have to. It’s annoying but take that up with the government and the millions of people who whine about the government not doing anything about ‘responsible drinking’ on the one hand whilst also drinking irresponsibly on the other (not to mention whining about ‘access pages’ and ‘age verification’ on websites ;-). It’s these people who are forcing alcohol (and now even confectionary companies) into such measures so that they can contiue to market their goods and provide information on mediums such as the web. As I understand it from reading a few things in the press if they don’t do this kind of thing they’ve been told that they’ll be banned from doign anything on the web in the future…