I don’t always get to use my own computer. And Corporate Desktops don’t let you change your settings. I had to use someone else’s Windows computer today to look up Cisco’s websites.
AHHHAHAAAHAHH MY eyes.
Look, I get that Uncle John wants us to use the web site so he makes more profits (read: lower support costs if customers do it themselves), which isn’t a bad idea since most of us know what we want anyway and don’t particularly want anyone else to help us out. And Cisco has tried to produce a lot of documentation – its a big part of our relationship. So there is lots of good content there and I spend a lot of time looking at the site. But lets keep it working. We need to put engineers back in charge of the design and ditch the bloody hipsters who are trying to be as offensive as possible – obviously their mothers hated them because they seem to need a lot of attention.
The Pustule of Filth Toolbar
I truly loathe the stupid toolbar in the bottom corner that sucks up screen real estate, slows down my page load, flashes in a most irritating manner every time I page up / down. 
. One thing I noticed is that it seems much worse on Windows than my OSX. How do people handle it.
At least, Give me an option to turn visual blight this off. Truly, I don’t care if there are features in there, just turn it off.
Make the JAVA download / basket an OPTION
The latest feature is that stupid download basket. What’s the thinking there ? Who needs to download more than one image at a time ? And in the last ten times that I tried to use it, it didn’t work say, seven out of ten. I always end up using the FTP download.
Let’s go back to FTP version. The Java idea is trash. Everyone hates Java. We hate Java anything and think you are fools for trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Let the idiots turn on the Java downloader if they want to. Engineers know that Java is not to be trusted, and will let you donw in a critical situation. Happened to me today when I could not download an image because Java client
Thanks. Customer is mega upset as well. Don’t mention it.
Bloody Feedback
On a bad day, I can read a couple of hundred pages at cisco.com. Why oh why does this stupid feedback block keep appearing. Can’t this be turned off ? Are you really that hard up for profits that you expect your customers to write (see the cisco wiki) AND EDIT the documentation ? Put some of those sixty five percent profit margins into reading it yourself.
Fat Footer
Why is the footer so large ? What’s the point of this ? At least, put a redacted version in the documentation pages so it removes the noise. Remember, I’ve already paid a fortune for this documentation, I don’t expect to see an advertisement on every page.
Cheesy Porn Star Blogs
I hate the “cheesy porn star” header on the blog header. It’s so “hipster” and the colours are offensive. Worse still, it’s a standardised marketing theme – they used derivative of it at Networkers for the stage backdrop. For reference, YES we had wallpaper on our kitchen in the seventies that looked exactly like this.
To the Marketing heads: It’s not cool, it makes you look desperate for attention. Yeah, that’s my personal opinion. You’re welcome.
I could go on and on
Look, there are parts of the website that are better. And even recently, some performance boosts and slightly better looking. But, get some engineers in the room and they will tell you what needs to change. The Technical pages need to be COMPLETELY stripped down with no rubbish, marketing or other wankery.
Keep it real.
Out.
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