Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I just got an email recently from an online tax preparing service. Its the same one that I used last year to do my taxes, and they were emailing me to get me to sign up again this year because they’ve got all my 2004 info on hand to make my tax prep easier this year.

I gotta say though, the web apps that these tax companies use are pretty cool, and the UI is usually really slick and nice. I just wish they would send me a friendly url in the email. Instead of a nice email that wont get line broken or anything like “http://www.example.com/ABCDEFG”, they sent me one with a bunch of querystring parameters and special characters.  This is bad for a couple reasons:

• The line breaks in some email clients make the link unclickable, because the link spans 2 lines, so half the text is a link, and the other half is lost as regular text.
• It looks crappy. This isn’t terribly important, but I like url’s to be clean and tidy.  Its not too hard to make them that way, and given how much they’ve spent making the tax prep web app, you’d think they could invest in a little url rewriting.

Whats even worse, is that they don’t even tell you how to get to the url in the case that the link goes across two lines.  Non-web savvy users aren’t always going to realize that the link is half broken, so they will just think they got a dead link, not too useful, and bad for business.  At the very least they could have a little message above the link that says “If this link does not work for you, try copying and pasting the link into your browser window…..”.  Granted, non-web savvy users probably don’t file their taxes online, but the problem of messy email url’s goes beyond tax preparation emails, this really applies to anyone sending an email.

UPDATE: Took the apostrophe out of the title, the incorrectness was bugging me (son of a teacher, what can I say)