Today I got an email from someone telling me that their BBB seal was disappearing when someone hovers over it.
I then looked at their site, where I saw that yes, sure enough, it the logo completely disappears when the mouse is hovered over it.
I decided to get the clients new BBB code, because that’s what it’s taken to fix the weird BBB seal each time they’ve stopped working over the years.
Imagine my surprise when I got a 404 page at their logo linking page I had bookmarked, with an image telling me “It looks like you have lost your way.”.
Then I tried their OLD account signin, that worked before the last time they changed URL structure with no notice, but nope – that’s a 404 too, this time in the old /oregon subdirectory, again telling me I had lost my way.
No, actually, it looks to me like you have lost your way, Better Business Bureau.
Using the “Lets Go Home” button took me to the BBB home page, but not the home page of my chapter, which is Oregon / Washington, so that didn’t help me..
It was only after going to the home page that I was redirected to /northwest/ and I realized they’ve changed some things to a new subdirectory called /northwest.
From there I tried to sign in from their actual working account login page, but that gave me a 500 error.
However, they didn’t do all of the necessary the 301 redirects – again.
Last week I noticed on a website that the seal had changed on my own site. It had become smaller and the text expanded wider, and it was that way on multiple sites. I pulled out my own widget because it really looked bad, and forgot about it.
When you move your brick and mortar business or change your phone number, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the customer can still get what they need, and it’s no different with a website.
You HAVE to redirect old important pages to the new corresponding pages. Besides being important for users, the search engines depend on it.
BBB Will You Please Fix This?
I believe that every Graphic Design Service Subscription should be worth it. Finally, after trying their various different login types, I got into the BBB dashboard. I went to grab the correct logo that I need, and sure enough, there’s a problem with the script for the 200px wide blue mouseover dynamic logo, and the error shows right inside of the BBB dashboard…
Oh well, it’s certainly their right to screw up their website as they see fit, and they can fix their redirects or not, I don’t much care. But when they screw up their customers websites, by changing logins, breaking their scripts, or changing everyone’s business profile URLs with no redirects like they did a couple of years ago, really bugs me.
