Playing Hide and Goto...

The internet is a virtual necessity, but it has some strange navigational challenges.

One is the stubborn persistence of whatever one creates on it versus the vexing disappearance of whatever one changes.

Example:  We used to be pageamonth.com, but changed to pagemonth.com this year and dropped the middle "a", yet search engines still list our former pageamonth pages.

Now I notice Google still lists a former Download page for pagemonth, (our new, correct site) which  claims we have free budgets.  We do not have free budgets.  We used to have free budgets, but we changed to paid budgets this year.  We tried to get Google to acknowledge that change, but to no avail.  So we navigated to the old Download page and informed freebie seekers  of the change ourselves, including a link to our pagemonth.com homepage bottom "Buy Now" Paypal button.  Clicking on it opens our Paypal purchasing page.  Completing the $9,95 one-time price opens our present download page where all our budgets and templates may be downloaded repeatedly at no further cost till the buyer leaves the page.

It amazes me how difficult technical people have made getting around on the internet, with their maze of passwords, gates, redirects, automatic do-not-reply emails, faceless support tickets, electronic politeness, and general lack of human contact.

They say it is all necessary to block malware-planters, thieves and hackers, who have become increasingly adept at what they do.  I feel like we nontechnical users (how many usernames do you have to manage?) are caught in the middle of a no-man;s-land technical war we can't understand, attacked by both sides. 

Still, the net may be more user-friendly with all its vexations than the electronic phone trees of any major business.  Don't even get me started on those.