How to confuse and annoy website users

From Saturday, January 28th, 2012 on http://cbc.ca

The web developers at CBC want to save me from an “older version of Internet Explorer”. That’s nice and all, but I’m on a Mac, using Firefox 10. Part of me blames Daniel Alfredsson, this is the kind of stunt he would pull.

CBC.ca thinks Firefox 10 is old Internet Explorer

From Thursday, January 26th, 2012 on http://williams-sonoma.com via http://evite.com

I clicked on a full page ad at the end of the signup and profile setup process on Evite.com. What can I say, I liked the ad and wanted to learn more about a blender… but I digress.

Evite knows I’m in Canada, since I just filled out and saved a profile. Of course there are also other ways to know this, especially for ad targeting.

First thing I notice on the Williams Sonoma site is the “shipping to” link with a USA flag – so I decide to re-scope my session with Canada as the shipping destination by clicking on the flag. Turns out Canada is not in the 75 countries that Williams Sonoma wants to sell online and ship to.

Williams Sonoma ships to 75 countries - but not Canada

I would have thought having the world’s 35th largest population would get us into the 75 ship-to locations — certainly ahead of Paraguay — which I’m told is a lovely country – ranked 105th in terms of population.