Bad web design just drives me bonkers: it’s not, in Philip Roth’s dictum, just fancy shamcy. Since customers from Bengal or California –the same customer pool the internet enables small business like these to reach— can’t go through the direct experience of entering a shop and seeing that everything is tidily organized, the clerks are knowledgeable, the service is correct, and that in general the shop is trustworthy, they rely on two semiotic elements to generate the same level of trust that ultimately makes them comfortable enough to go ahead with their purchase: information and general web appearance. The people at RandL.com have managed to efficiently overlook such considerations, and have come up with a site where users are able to find minuscule pictures of radio equipment, a price and a ‘buy this’ button. When it comes to books, though, it just becomes worse and worse: books have only titles (no authors, no ISBN, no summaries, no reviews, no nothing). The site can be searched using the categories, by brand, or by browsing the used equipment category, which will render a list of models, price tags and buy buttons, though no information on condition, usage or performance. There’s certainly lots of hard work in store for the people at RandL.com: I’m curious to see where they will begin.