Website designers need filling in on issue

Perhaps the young (and many others) should sit down, and prepare for a shock, before reading on.

Fact: not everyone has a cellphone.

That fact seems to have escaped the notice of many businesses and government departments which, rather than giving an email address for those who want to contact them by that medium, have a section on their website in which one enters personal and contact details — first name, last name, email address, phone number — before typing in a message.

Fill them all in. Click on the box to verify that one is a real person, not a computer, and, if asked, on which of a matrix of pictures contains cars, bicycles, or whatever (how reliable is that with the recent advances in artificial intelligence?), and, eventually, on the "submit" or "send" box.

But rather than confirming that the message has been sent, the screen flips back to the information boxes, where the landline number that Civis entered has vanished, and the box for it annotated, often in red, "required", or something similar.

Civis’ spouse doesn’t have a cellphone. Civis has one (a small, old-fashioned-looking, folding phone, solely for telephone and occasional text use), but it’s only used away from home, because there’s no cellphone reception at home unless one climbs the long, steep drive to the street.

So giving a cellphone number is pointless, except to get the email sent.

Civis recently experienced this frustrating refusal to accept a landline number when emailing a company about a piece of medical equipment; was forced, when the landline number was rejected, to insert the useless cellphone number; and (luckily) added to the message a grumpy addendum complaining about rejection of the landline number, explaining the problem and giving the landline number, which enabled the company to phone to discuss what type of equipment would be best.

But life would be easier if those who design these websites allowed for landline phone numbers.

 

While on the subject of websites — Aurora once used to publish in the ODT a list of its planned power cuts, occupying a wide yellow column down the left-hand side of a page. It listed the affected streets, and gave the estimated times that the power would go off and go on again, ranging from an hour to all day. Outages have been necessary for the upgrade and repair programme to which the company (finally) committed, but at least ODT readers could know what was happening: they could quickly run down the list of streets involved to see if they would be affected.

No more.

Aurora still publishes an advertisement headed "Planned Power Outages" but it only occupies a strip 10cm deep across the bottom of a page.

It gives sensible information about preparing for outages, keeping safe and late cancellations, but no list of affected streets, or even areas.

Under "How do I find out about planned outages?" are two bullet points claiming that "you * Will be notified by your retailer (who you pay your bill to)", and "* Can check the Aurora Energy website", and then advises readers to "Keep up to date by checking current and future outages on our website".

Civis’ home has been subject to several planned outages in the past few years, prepared for thanks to information in the ODT advertisement, but only one of them was notified by the retailer, so that avenue for information seems a broken reed.

Does Aurora expect everyone (including those who don’t use or even own, a computer or cellphone) to check its website every day to make sure they won’t be subject to an outage? Come on Aurora — get real!

 

Civis tried to watch Act New Zealand leader David Seymour’s "State of the Nation" speech online late last month.

But the video window was annotated: "The supplied livestream of Seymour’s speech was too unstable to run." Is there a message there?