Steve's Things

After a few years of looking on the web for various items, the trend towards mandatory registration on certain websites is becoming more and more prevalent. Now, I’m not talking about social networking sites or the really massive corporations, I’m talking about the mid-size companies that have their IT dude make them a site.

Nowadays if you want to find any kind of information on the product a smaller company makes, you have to register for an account on their site even for things like datasheets. While on the surface this seems like a good idea, since you can engage the person in setting up an account on your site and have their e-mail address for later, it is irritating at best. Unfortunately, companies take it so far as to require you to register for almost every thing under the sun. Things I’ve seen required registration for:

• Product Pricing
• Data Sheet
• Frequently asked questions
• Their forums (Not to post, just to see their forums)
• The products they make!?!?!

Like I said, I can see the logic to it in terms of engaging the browser, however, myself I find myself backing out of the page, even if I need the information when presented with a ridiculous registration prompt. I’m fairly certain that other people do the same thing when looking for a product. Especially when looking for parts. There are so many manufacturers of similar parts and when you have to go from site to site and fill in a billion fields of data just to see what they fucking make is absolutely ridiculous!

All I can say is this. STOP REQUESTING REGISTRATION YOU IDIOTS!

In the end they only increase the traffic on their phone lines with engineers and designers that simply want some damned information. Stupid.