Things that Amaze Me

It's 2007, and yet...

• I often go to the web site of a retail store, and the store locator is hard to find.
• I often go to restaurant web sites and can't find the hours of operation anywhere on the site.
• I do Google searches for restaurants, and can't find the restaurant's web site because all the top search results are dining guides, magazines, etc. that review the site. (Hint: every restaurant with a web site should set up a Google AdWords campaign sponsoring their own name, so that at least an ad appears and people can find them. Every dining guide site should get over their fear of someone clicking a link off the site and include a link to the restaurant web site.)
• I visit the site of a newspaper with a name that's not geographically specific ("The West Valley Gazette") and on the home page, I cannot figure out what state they're in.
• I go to a site with real estate listings and even though I have created an account and am getting daily emails with new or changed listings, when I click the links in those emails I can't use the site's "save listing" feature... because they don't put login screens anywhere but one specific page one screen down from the home page.

Aren't these basic things that we all figured out years ago?

Technorati tags: web design, usability, search marketing