My wife wants to visit someone in the hospital today. So she goes to the hospital Web site to check the visiting hours.

Today’s challenge: Click that link above and try to find visiting hours anywhere. I dare you.

This is one of the worst Web site usability issues I’ve seen in a long time. I have to think that among the phone calls a hospital receives in any given day, “What are your visiting hours?” has to be among the top questions operators deal with.

Why isn’t there a link to “visiting hours” on the home page? Why aren’t visiting hours listed on the contact or directions pages? Why doesn’t a site search for “visiting hours” return a relevant page with this sort of basic information?

It’s a great example of a site that’s about the entity creating the site, not about the people using the site.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re working on a Web site, think like your site user and anticipate their needs. Then fulfill them. Duh.

Sooner or later, you’re going to be involved in designing, or managing the design, of a landing page. Or maybe you’ve been working with landing pages for years.

No matter which end of the landing page spectrum on which you fall, you’ll probably find episode 86 of Susan Bratton’s excellent Dishy Mix podcast to be compelling listening. Susan spends a solid hour talking with Tim Ash, President and CEO of SiteTuners.com and the author of Landing Page Optimization:  The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

It’s well worth a listen (or a read, since a transcript is conveniently included on that link above, too) — and not only because Tim answers my question, one I’ve wrestled with over the years, that being: How do you balance the need for selling with the need for educating the potential buyer on any given landing page? (Thanks, Susan!)

Takeaway for marketers: Listen to this podcast. If you’re a relative newcomer to dealing with landing pages, there is a ton of info here that you need to know. If you’re a landing page veteran, you’ll have some food for thought and probably be reminded of some best practices you may have let slip over the years. Either way, it beats spending an hour watching Becker reruns.

Gunaxin has posted a terrific retrospective of discontinued breakfast cereals. Each one of them was undoubtedly brought to market with enthusiasm, supported by marketing plans and research and expertise that suggested success beyond any shadow of a doubt — something worth keeping in mind as you review this extensive gallery.

You can find plenty of people who remember Quisp and Quake, the poster boys of discontinued cereal, but what about OJs? Monopoly cereal? Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy? Crazy Cow? Crunchy Loggs?

In addition to the obligatory history and occasional snark accompanying each title, Gunaxin has gone the extra mile and provided, where available, commercials for these lost products. The Puffa Puffa Rice spot had found a dusty spot somewhere deep in my memory, so it was fun to see that one once again. And there’s even an excuse to revist an Eddie Murphy routine.

Takeaway for marketers: Those who forget the past, or at least are unaware of the past, are condemned to repeat it.

Just in case your Internet access has been down these last few days, you might want to click on over to Skittles.com and see what’s going on there. Essentially, their “Web site” is a widget that delivers social media content like Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia pages about Skittles.

David Berkowitz posted a good article yesterday about it all over on MediaPost, and he does a great job at articulating the core of the Skittles experiment when he notes, “Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.”

Yep. We’re talking Cluetrain 101, folks. Thesis #90 seems particularly appropos: “Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.”

Originally, the “home page” for Skittles was Twitter, then it changed to Facebook. Was that part of an intended rotation of social networks when someone types in the URL? Was it a retreat from the wild, wild openness of Twitter? This Mashable article, and the comments that go with it, review the possibilities.

I salute the boldness Skittles is displaying. At a time when most brands are dipping their toes into the social media waters, Skittles climbs up to the high board, takes a running start and a big bounce, and hits the pool with a big honkin’ messy cannonball that splashes water all over the place.

Whatever one thinks of this experiment, Skittles is ground zero of the online marketing world this week.

I anxiously await news of whether their sales rose, fell, or remained stagnant because of all this.

Takeaway for marketers: Is your toe in the water? Do you wish you had the guts to cannonball? Are you worried that getting wet might muss your hair?

According to a survey from Datran Media, reported over on Marketing Charts, an “overwhelming majority” (that would be 80.4%) of marketers say email is the top-performing advertising channel. Not the top-performing online channel, the top-performing advertising channel.

Meanwhile, the retail world is loving their email marketing: eMarketer reports that email marketing was on the increase throughout 2008. It’s reasonable to expect that trend to continue throughout 2009.

Takeaway for marketers: As the economy pounds advertising budgets, we can expect email marketing to increase. Inboxes will become more crowded than ever — which makes it more important than ever for companies to (a) respect those inboxes, and (b) speak in the most human, authentic terms possible. In other words: what they should have been doing all along.