Thrifty Hipster Review

Thrifty Hipster used to be a great website that was an invaluable tool when looking for great food and drink specials in the Twin Cities... but not anymore. What used to be a clean, easy to use website was recently transformed into a mess that is so broken it's mostly unusable. This was a classic example of change simply for the sake of change, and adding useless bells and whistles that just slow everything down and annoying visitors. This is absolutely one of the worst websites on the internet.

To begin with, this website is just an eyesore. The colors are ugly pastels, there are ads and banners everywhere, and the layout is way too busy. Change the colors, move some of the ads, and simplify the layout. Why do I have to scroll down just to reach the menu? Move the logos and shift the real content up.

On the left is a menu bar where you can scroll through the restaurant listings, but for some reason you have to click on them twice in order to bring up the info in the main frame. You click on the name, which brings up another button that says "more details," which you have to click on to see the details. Why do I have to do this? Do they have the second button come up because they think people are going to keep accidentally hitting restaurants for which they don't want more details? That's insane. This may sound like a petty complaint, but if I'm clicking through a few different restaurants, having to click twice just to bring up a pointless second button gets annoying. Just skip the "more details" button and go straight to the details after I click on the name of the restaurant.

Even worse is that clicking for more details doesn't just reload the single frame, but the entire page. This is annoying as hell and will make you want to throw your computer across the room. This means the scroll bar with the list of restaurants resets itself every time you click on a link for more details. So if you are going down the list in alphabetical order and click on a listing for a restaurant that starts with, say, H, the entire page reloads and the list goes back to A. This is some poor website design that could be easily fixed with a couple changes to the code.

Even worse than worse is how there's an overlayer that appears explaining how the website works, as though most people who are coming to the page are new to the internet or something. Trust me, Thrifty Hipster, we can figure it out on our own. We don't need these instructions even once, let alone a dozen times randomly as I navigate through the page. Seriously, this thing kept popping up and I had to click on close over and over again. If there's a way to turn it off, I couldn't figure out how, and that was the one piece of information they left out of the instructions. Maybe if I log-in through facebook it'll remember me and stop giving me this pop-up, but I'm not going to do that. Why should I have to do that?

So... Thrifty Hipster. What once was a great, handy, easy to use website has been turned into an annoying, broken, mess. The logo does say "beta," but it's said that for at least the past six months or so, and these complaints are so fundamental that they never should've been there at all. If you want to use this website, the only functional way that isn't completely annoying is with an iphone or other device, since the mobile site is just straight text with links that work.