Tonight is one that didn't come from television. It is one from personal experience in an attempt to make this blog more visible and easier to follow via RSS readers such as Google Reader. It really frustrated me to no end that getting help, in this day and age, is so difficult. Why does it have to be?
I believe I have mentioned that I am hoping to put a few ads on the site just to generate some revenue but it is mostly based on page views. I am only getting between 10 and 30 views per day so I think it would take me nearly 3 months just to hit Google's $10 threshold before they would send me a check. I don't want to waste time and effort just to make $3 per month. Not to mention that I don't want you to have to view those ads if I am not going to get anything from it. So I started out just doing a search to see what was out there as suggestions on getting more traffic to your blog. It is kind of funny, there are a lot of sites that apparently specialize in giving advice on how to increase your traffic. I probably should have seen that coming I guess as they just want to drive up their traffic. Most of these sites had a very small article surrounded by a lot of ads. And some of them drove up the page views by simply limiting each page of the article to the amount of space that I've used to this point. Really sad.
But there was one that suggested setting up Feedburner to help get the RSS piece out there to make it easier for folks to follow. So I did that. Where I ran into problems was getting it to work correctly so I turned to the help link. It dutifully took me to the help section or the Feedburner site where I found such vague help that I was better off stumbling though it on my own. I still don't have things working the way I would like them to work. And the thing that really ticks me off is that I can't figure out how to correct it. Anyway, you can now use your favorite reader to link, I put that to the right of the latest post. Just click the drop-down and select how you want to connect.
So, as you can guess, this leads to a much larger problem. This is just one simple example of how companies are getting out of creating useful help documentation. Their argument for not giving you a printed manual anymore isn't that it saves trees, it is because they can keep it up to date much easier. I suppose it is easier since those who know how to use the product monitor the forums for the product and voluntarily answer questions. It is really sad that in order to get answers you avoid the companies help site and go straight to a forum for the software. And part of what drives you to these forums is that they are easier to search. For the most part when I've done a search on a help site it gives something similar to an "I don't know" answer. Sure you can click through their tree to try to find the answer, probably take you a lot longer than searching a forum though. And has anyone else thought they have found an answer just to have it link to a page that sent you to that page? I can't recall how many times I've found myself in a loop.
I think the worst part of the whole situation is that the worst offenders of this are the technology companies. One would think their support pages would be the best but they have proven to be some of the worst.
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