To a certain extent I am not entirely sure that any of the New Zealand TV stations really get what to do with their websites. The only reason I ever visit any of them is to find out what is on, or when a specific program is on. The two major networks seem to make this incredibly difficult. I guess they think that if we can’t find out when the program we want to watch is on we might just sit and watch their channel all day and night until we see it. Besides, they have all this news they want you to look at (who goes to a TV channel website to get their news?)
To their credit the main page of the Prime site has the complete listings for the current day. No news, no third party advertising, in fact a refreshingly minimal amount of bullshit.
But, in what can only be described as monumentally stupid they add this splash page:
Whose idea was this? Why is it there? Who would find this useful or entertaining?
The only possible use for it I could think of would be to click on images from the show you are looking for and be given the times that it will play. Does that happen? Of course not!
When you click on images from a show you are interested in you get a description of the show… Is there anyone for whom this is remotely intuitive or useful?
Of course, they have a lot of other problems that need fixing, like all their validation errors, or getting rid of the unnecessary tables that they have used for layout, but the single biggest improvement they could make is to bite the bullet and ditch that stupid splash page. After all, it ain’t 1998 no more.
