YOU magazine online, the Prius and the missing winners

I picked up a YOU magazine to read today. No, it wasn’t Posh: My Lonely Life in LA, nor Glam in India but is groom a fake? that drew me in. Rather, it was Win a R270 000 Toyota Prius – with one SMS.

Knowing that many of these SMS competitions make a profit for the company running them, I was interested to see how much they were charging for the opportunity to win a Prius. And those who know me will know I would much prefer to drive a Prius than say, the newly-launched Cadillac.

The page containing details of the prize simply provided a number and code to SMS, with the small print pointing to the rules on another page. These rules didn’t indicate a price, only saying that calls will be charged at VAS (value-added-service) rates, which means nothing to me. Elsewhere on the page though, I saw a mention that all previous prize winners were listed on the YOU magazine website, so I thought I’d investigate further there.

Wow. What a shock to see the site. It makes Neville’s most loathed site, the SA Ministry of Intelligence, look like Youtube in comparison.

On a checklist of bad design, it would probably carry the house. Animated gif’s, broken rendering (in Firefox at least), the two options login and subscribe both go to the same page (and mention you should register first), and just general below-par design. Besides this, what concerned me more was that I could see no list of previous prize winners (even after trying various search terms).

I’m sure it’s a legal requirement to display the price of a competition SMS, and I’m sure it’s, if not illegal, at least unethical to lead readers on a wild goose chase to find the supposed previous winners.

Oh, and it was no surprise to see that they suffer from what Quirk has termed Lame-Ass Syndrome – it will not work without the www.

Technorati tags: bad+design web+design YOU+magazine prius