PopPhoto.com: Website Fail

A few months ago, I received a hand-me-down DSLR - the original Canon Digital Rebel. Just recently, I was reading an old copy (2004) of Popular Photography that mentioned the D-Rebel in an article about Nikon's (then new) D70. This made me think that maybe I could find the Pop Photo review of the D-Rebel and see what they'd had to say.

I first went to popphoto.com using Google Chrome, my current browser of choice. I put "canon digital rebel" in the search box and the list of results gave me one link that was very obviously the page that I wanted. Or so I thought . . . when that page loaded, there was some text that said:

"Download our
Canon EOS Digital Rebel Full Test
-requires Adobe Acrobat Reader

But there's no link at all.

Just to check things out, I copied the URL and tried to access it using IE7. First I got a message at the bottom of my screen telling me that the page "required" an add-on that I currently have disabled. Before I could click on that message though, I was bombarded by cookie warnings (I have IE set to prompt me for anything except session cookies). There were at least ten sites that wanted to drop a cookie on my system. Once I stopped all that, I tried to check with add-on was so desperately required for that page to work. Of course IE doesn't tell me that, it just shows me which ones are disabled and which are enabled. There are a couple disabled items that are related to instant messengers, and two that belong to Real. So are they trying to serve me an ad in some kind of Real media format? I can't figure it out.

But aside from all that, what I came here for was the Digital Rebel PDF. And there's still no link.

I checked the source, no "pdf" string anywhere, no any evidence of anything that would resemble a link near the text offering me a download.

OK, then, I'll be a nice net citizen and report the broken page. But the closest thing to a "contact us" link is all about subscriptions and leads off of popphoto.com completely (with no warning).

Maybe there's something on the home page, says I, so I click on the logo to get me there. Well yeah, there's something. It's an annoying graphic that keeps rotating through three "featured stories" with no way of stopping or pausing it. It's not making me want to click on any of the stories, it's making me want to stab somebody with a fork.

There's more, but I think you get the idea. It's another website set up to maximize ads with seemingly no thought given to usability.

popphoto.com: Website fail.