I've seen a lot of this in business space and it is ridiculous. Business users should be trained/expected to know how to properly use browsers similarly how they are trained/expected to know how to use Word and Excel. This includes a reasonable understanding of URLs.

The web is everywhere. It's time to accept that web literacy is necessary for working in an office. This includes things like working with tabs, creating bookmarks and using in-page search.

Agreed, while I dont think everyone needs to be a car mechanic, the idea that we need to simplify and hide every component of the web is actively harmful.

Indeed. People usually spend 30+ hours operating a vehicle under supervision just to learn the basics of steering and moving around, before being allowed on public roads. And they don't think much of that, it's normal. Expecting a couple minutes of learning what is an "address" and where is the "address bar" isn't too much to ask.

My side of the phone call (sometimes multiple times with the same customer):

What do you mean "the site isn't coming up"?

OK, I'll take a look right now... yep, it loads just fine.

Can't find it? Just type the domain name in to the address bar...

No, that's the search bar, I mean, you can use that, but it's only been a couple of days and [search engine] probably hasn't indexed it yet.

OK, if you want to look at it right now, then type the name of your website into the text field at the very top.

What do you mean it still isn't coming up? It loaded fine for me.

...It's not in the list of links... OK, that's still [search engine] results. How about this, type the name of your site, plus the dot com, and nothing else. Got it?

OK, now press enter.

Tada!

Have you tried only guiding them through keystrokes? Like Ctrl+L-y-o-u-r-d-o-m-a-i-n-Dot-c-o-m-Enter?

Back in my tech support days, I found that it is surprising how often you get to the thing you need if you dictate things like Win+R "ncpa.cpl" this way instead of relying a non-techie user to find the next icon to look for.

A part might also be that the other side switches into "this is arcane magic, I have no clue and have to make sure I follow the directions properly" mode...

You forgot the part where you have to e-mail them the link, so they can click on it--or cut-and-paste it, if they have a sysadmin who got sick of cleaning up after the execs get phished or spearphished.

This.

Also, this is a story of success. Sometimes it ends with "trust me, your site is up, just give it time".

I wonder why you don't adjust your expectations?

What would "adjust your expectations" look like exactly? While these clients are the minority, it happens often enough that I'd like to find a solution.

I was younger then. Assuredly, my expectations are no longer the same. (And I no longer do that type of work.)

> which leads to newly launched website owners thinking their website isn't accessible

I mean, practically, if it doesn't turn up when searched for, it _isn't_ accessible to 99% of the world.

I hear you, except in reality there are plenty of places a new business might expect users to navigate to their website from, e.g. their URL could be listed in a common proprietary platform such as Yelp or Twitter, and it could also be in a marketing email or even a business card. Hopefully new generations will understand what a URL is, and perhaps some informative campaigns could keep the public aware. We learned how to describe directions around a cute town on a piece of paper when I was in the 2nd grade, so why shouldn't elementary schools teach basic internet essentials to kids at some fairly early grade level?

I'm talking about 20 minutes to several hours after launch.

Also, many won't "google" their website address, but instead their business name. For a newly launched website, many national business directory listings (manta, angies list etc.) will outrank the official site for quite some time.

Completely new sites might take a while to rank, even for the exact keyword/business name.

If they're on AdWords, they could be paying dollars-not-cents every time they google themselves and click on the first (paid) link. Just because they're happy to pay the racketeers when a customer does that, doesn't mean they should pay the racketeers even more because of their own poor understanding of browser use.