It would seem that Dr. Pepper may know soda pop, but they certainly do not know how to manage a website.

For those who may not know of the situation, Dr. Pepper offered a challenge to the band Guns N’ Roses to release their 14-years-in-the-making album, ‘Chinese Democracy’ before the end of 2008.  If the band met this deadline, Dr. Pepper would give everyone in the United States of America a free soda.  Well, the band met that demand, and the album was officially released today.  Dr. Pepper stood by their word and said that people could go to their website for 24 hours on November 23rd and claim a coupon for a free drink.

While it is good of them to have stood by their word, no one can seem to navigate their site to claim the coupons.  When you enter, you get a static page that says “Loading” and never changes.  After a while, the following message appeared at the top of the page.

This website has been designed to be keyboard accessible. To access the primary navigation utilize the tab button. Access to secondary and tertiary navigation can be further accessed through a combination of tab and arrow key actions.

Well, even that doesn’t seem to work.  As I am writing this, Dr. Pepper has changed the site again, but clicking on the link to the free promotion takes you to a page that is also not loading.

In short, Dr. Pepper should have expected this massive surge of traffic and prepapred for it, but instead they seem to be trying to play catch up while the traffic continues to pour in.  While it is an interesting concept for a promotion, it certainly could have been handled better and with a better anticipation for the type of demand they would be facing.  There is a lesson here for all webmasters when it comes to their trafficduring a promotion, and it comes from the Boy Scouts handbook: Always Be Prepared.