Tom Doyle :: TALK

The new Dell.ie website is pretty poor in my opinion. Not only does it look pretty weak, all those areas that I would frequent, like support etc aren’t as easy to access anymore.

Disappointed with this, there websites are usually top notch.

www.dell.ie

I think it’s important for everyone to use a number of different statistics packages to get to grips with exactly what is going on with your website. We use 3 different packages on our site, a server side one, Google Analytics and Statcounter.

Many moons ago now, we had a website that some people actually loved the look of… I really don’t know why, but anyway, it lead to some people plagerising the design (www.comman.de) and using it for there own website.

The wayback machine, does the old site no justice, but you can get the picture - http://web.archive.org/web/20050118093135/http://www.2bscene.net/

You see, this crowd in Germany rippied it off and I honestly didn’t mind, until it started getting a bit of traffic. Because soon enough a chunk of our statistical information on Statcounter became corrupted with their data. Not only did they rip the design, they also took the code for my Statcounter account.

I guess I could easily change my Statcounter code, but why should I? This crowd are the ones who ripped off someones work (and made it look even worse - and that was hard) shouldn’t they simply remove the code? I did ask many times, but it fell on deaf ears.

Maybe now, when Google picks up this blog ahead of Comman International in the search results, they will read this and hopefully remove it from their site!

In fact, I think this site is worthy of the Worst Site of the Week honour!!

I was finding it hard to find one this week. Most sites I’ve been on have been pretty good this week, until I went looking for a broadband package…

www.irishbroadband.ie - has to be one of the worst sites I’ve been on in a long time. Aesthetically it’s clean and bright, but from a functionality and UX point of view it is terrible site.

For example, when you choose “Business Users” from the homepage, you get 3 boxes. SOHO, SME’s & Corporate. When you’ve decided which one you are, there is a button that says “Find out more”. Fair enough… However when you click this, you get a little pop-up box that has a small description and two large buttons. One says “Full Story” and the other “Order Now”. “Full Story” means absolutely nothing to me and is completely out of context and I certainly don’t want to order anything yet, so eh.. I’ll just click off. I should have clicked “Full Story” as I would have got more information on the product, but that wasn’t very clear. There are plenty of examples similar to this on the website.

Poor website, which I imagine was developed in-house.

Spurred on by Michele Neylon’s new www.coolsites.ie - I’ve decided to do something that I’ve wanted to do for quite sometime. And that is exactly what Michele is doing, except not as frequently (there’s no way I could do one a day! Fair play to you man!).

So for now I’ll be trying to review at least one Cool Website a week. My cool websites will be based on design, innovation, marketing excellence or simply just a bloody damn good website.

I’ll also create a “worst websites of the week” section, which will be for utterly terrible websites!

So to get things started… here’s my first installment for the coolest site of the week…

www.puneetsakhuja.com
Just a nice site from Dubai web designer - Puneet Sakhuja

And the worst site of the week?

www.electricpicnic.ie
Well just back from the great weekend there, but the website is absolutely terrible. The thing that annoys me most is the ridiculous navigation and the poorly informative information.