Great post! I've spent many hours searching through the Adobe site trying to find things. For a company trying to spearhead web development it's a poor show.
Sunil -----Original Message----- From: Radley Marx [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 04 September 2008 20:50 To: Flash Coders List Subject: [Flashcoders] SOT: (Rant) Why is Adobe.com such a bad website? As a designer and developer, I *envied* the design of macromedia.com. I studied it. Other companies copied it. I remember what a beautiful website MM once had, and at the time how Adobe's was the exact opposite - ugly, hard to use, thoughtless. When Adobe bought Macromedia, they immediately adopted the MM site. Brilliant move! But over the past couple of years, Adobe has really beat it down with the ugly stick. With the demise of Flashpaper, I came across this page: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/eod_faq/ This is probably one of the ugliest, thoughtless pages from a serious source I've ever experienced in my career. Aesthetically, it's depressing. Depression-era-chic depressing. As a utility, it's restrictive. I must click on each question to discover the facts, with many simply answering "No." Functionality, it's ridiculously ironic. Topic: Flashpaper discontinued. First link: Buy online. Other rants / examples: 1) How does a developer download the debug player via the download page? There's no link! http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=Sho ckwaveFlash Answer? It's actually down in "Support / Flash Player". But most developers find it via a better source: Google search. 2) Link icons on the debugger download page have been wrong for *years*. The text links are right, but check out what happens if you use the actual download arrows. You may accidently get Flash 8, or Windows .exe instead of .dmg for Mac downloads. http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html (Note that I even managed to get an Adobe team member to forward these bugs to the web team. Was never fixed.) 3) Look at this product page: http://www.adobe.com/products/ Why does it look like an abandoned store? It looks like a outsourced Drupal project. Where's the flair? The edge? Adobe.com makes me want to submit a bid to fix it. What happened? I *REALLY* want to know! I just don't get it. My apologies to the list for this rant. I really hope this gets the attention of someone significant @ Adobe. thank you. -radley ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Radley Marx www.radleymarx.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
