Tom Doyle

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Archive for category Bad Sites

Worst site of the DECADE!

Apr 9

Posted by Tom Doyle in Bad Sites

This is an image of the PC World store at King...
Image via Wikipedia

As suggested by Ben101 on a comment on a previous post, Currys, Dixons and PC World have to win the Worst Website of the Decade award.

Using the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine, it’s clear that Curry’s have had an under construction note since 2000. They also had Dixons logo on it even then! Look here >>

We can also see that Dixons had the same message back in 2000 too, but went a little further in 2007 with the following tripe in May 2007 – Funnily enough, their account was suspended in November 2007 – too much traffic maybe?

PC World had the same message in 2000, however later archives show that they did actually make an attempt to go online with their business.

You can see the history of the three here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pcworld.ie/
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.currys.ie
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dixons.ie/

It’s a little surprising that some of our biggest eletrical retail outlets never really made an attempt to do business online. You just have to look at Power City‘s existing website to see that they don’t value the Internet much. http://www.powercity.ie/

Maybe it’s because consumers can see more easily online that they are being ripped off?

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Shopping for Jewelry (Jewellery) Online

Dec 8

Posted by Tom Doyle in Bad Sites

As I continue to search for Christmas presents online, I have to admit I still get quite frustrated with Irish retailers online.

Over the weekend I search for an online jewelry store to purchase a gift for my mother. Instantly I was bombarded with jewelry websites that I can only say have been “left behind” in terms of the Internet. It was extremely difficult to find any decent Irish jewelry shop where searching.

I did find one that looked like it did everything I was looking for – the famous House of Ireland store. Everything looked good for a while as I browsed through the site, there was plenty of choice unlike other sites I had visited. One thing stroke me though, the prices were displayed in US Dollars by default. As their shop in Dublin is hugely targeted at the US tourists, I thought, ah no big deal, I’ll just choose Euros from the drop down menu.

After doing this, I noticed the price difference was staggering. A Waterford Crystal vase was $260, but when converted to euro it was a huge €240. With today’s exchange rate, it should have been in the €200-205 price bracket. I assume the difference in price is because they have displayed the dollar price minus the VAT and when you change to euros, it instantly adds the VAT price on. This is all well and good if they didn’t display dollar prices by default.

From a technical point of view, there is quite a lot they can do to prevent this sort of confusion for the customer. IP location software is widely available on the Internet, it would have taken a programmer a few hours to display the currency based on the customers location. Not 100% reliable I know, but in most cases would work pretty well.

The site itself is built in some flavour of either osCommerce or Zen Cart. Both of these packages have ready build modules to handle situations like this.

Better still, a simple notification that the dollar price didn’t include VAT would also prevent people from getting suspicious in the difference in price.

All in all – it looks like there really are no decent Irish Jewelry stores online. If you know of one, please let me know!

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Worst site of the Week

Sep 26

Posted by Tom Doyle in Bad Sites

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

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Comman International – Please stop using my statcounter code :(

Sep 16

Posted by Tom Doyle in Bad Sites, Rantings

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!!

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Worst site of the week – IrishBroadband

Sep 11

Posted by Tom Doyle in Bad Sites

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.

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