Friday, October 17, 2008

Fox Movie Channel's lousy web-site

My DirecTV box lists Richard Widmark's Oscar-nominated role in Kiss of Death as showing at 2:00 PM ET today on the Fox Movie Channel. Unfortunately, FMC's own web-site gives different information, and seems to be wrong. They're suggesting that Sentimental Journey was supposed to be on at 8:00 AM, while the box guide says it should be Decision Before Dawn, which the few seconds I watched showed it to be.

The first upshot of this is that it makes life tougher on anybody who wants to see some of the great old classics that were made at Fox -- I probably would have blogged about Kiss of Death had I known more than a few hours in advance that it was going to be shown today. However, FMC's web-site isn't very good in more than just being factually incorrect. It's entirely Flash-based, which is a huge pain in the rear for web navigation. I for one like to be able to right-click on links and be able to open them in a new browser tab. Flash doesn't let you do that; a right click only brings up the Flash dialogs. The site's old design, which changed probably two years ago, also allowed for browsing the schedule a week at a time; now, you're limited to one day at a time. Worse, if you click on the title of a movie to get a synopsis, and then go back in your browser, you don't get sent back to the day on which the movie aired. You get sent back to today's schedule, which can be highly inconvenient (especially if you're looking through a week of movies that's part in one month and part in another).

If anybody from Fox is reading this, please come up with a site design that doesn't require Flash.

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