Website failures - a professional and personal nightmare

As an online specialist it strikes me as odd that there are websites on the internet now, which are not optimised for UX. But as a consumer who uses the internet to purchase almost everything now, it infuriates me that there are such a large number of websites which simply do not work!

From large websites where the proper attention hasn't been paid (such as the security breaches found in Tesco and the user experience nightmare that is the Olympics website), to the small local websites which rely on every bit of new business to survive.

I have recently found two situations where this has been the case.

1. Local restaurant website.
There is a lovely restaurant near us, which has only recently opened in the last year. It was a very welcome addition to our choices of eating out as we're limited being in the middle of the countryside. They seem to have ticked all the right boxes. They launched with some local advertising, they had a website which looked professional and they even launched a Facebook Page and Twitter account which wasn't too bad considering they probably had no budget.

Their food is divine, but they're not going to get passing trade so they must rely heavily on word of mouth in the local area and their website/social activity.

Recently they decided to change their menu - all fine. They managed expectations by taking down the old menus and posting a note saying they were trialling a new summer menu.

However, they have since updated the website with the new menus... but only partly. The site is littered with broken links, even the main nav is broken! The new menus are also built using an iframe and a word doc, which isn't visible at all on a mobile or tablet. So whilst I have persevered because I know the quality, most people won't.

2. Local trade sites

I'm working on a garden project and have finally given in and decided I need to get a skip. That means a local company search as I'm not going to find anything nationally that serves our little town.

I'm delighted to find that almost all of the local skip companies are well represented online. They are featured on Yell.com, they appear in the Google natural SERPs, some are even in the Places search.
I want to compare prices, but given I'm in work when they're open I'm opting to use the online option to get quotes.

Most of the sites I find have a specific online form for prices, some simply ask you to 'contact them' using their contact form. One even promises to give an instant online quote. These are good options for me and fit my needs, until I start to actually fill them in.

The instant quote form doesn't do anything when I submit the page, so I don't know whether it's broken, whether the validation has failed or whether this is what I should expect and I'll get an email with my price.

Of the rest only two of the seven sites actually allow me to complete my request online. This means 5 of these websites, which advertise a way to contact them online, display an error page when I submit the form. I get an array of 404s, 500s and even a 'You haven't entered your name, please complete this field' message. Now the latter is helpful, if I hadn't actually filled in my name, but I had.

Whoever has built the website for each of these small companies hasn't tested their work. And what's worse, the owners of the business have obviously not ensured that everything works. If they can't get their website right, what confidence should I have in their ability to do anything?

So I'm left feeling frustrated, but at least two companies are giving me a quote, right? Nope, a week later and I've only had one response.


It's great that small businesses now see the importance of having a website, but as a user, I'm left more annoyed by a website which doesn't work than I would be by them simply having a listing on Yell with just their telephone number.

There are 2 types of people...

Nigella Lawson once said in her tv program, "There are 2 types of people: those that make lists and those that manage to get through life" or at least it was something like that. This was when my love for Nigella was cemented because she is so right. She carried on to say that she was definitely the former and I am too.

My Jim is quite the opposite to me and is definitely a winger, he somehow manages to get through life without planning anything. He finds my planning instinct (which is obviously a result of my job where organising myself and others is key) very weird and totally out of control.

For The Trip, I have understandably made a number of lists. I have never flown long haul (so I am planning in detail what to take on the plane) and I have never been travelling or on holiday for longer than 2 weeks. Jim on the other hand has done both, frequently, and usually just turns up! Very different to my approach.

I thought I'd document the lists/spreadsheets I've made to see if anyone thought I was going over the top:

1. Places to visit in Oz - to decide where to go.
2. Airlines that travel to Australia.
3. Seat width, height and leg room, inflight meal, cost and reviews for each airline.
4. Flight times.
5. Numbers 4 and 5 for internal flights (of which there are 6)
6. Hotels: cost, location, facilities and ratings for each town we visit.
7. Cost from 7 different discount hotel websites for the chosen hotels.
8. Transfers from the airports.
9. Things to do in each town.
10. Restaurants in each town which had good reviews, nice looking food and at a reasonable cost.
11. Breakfast cafes.

12. Things to take on the plane to make long haul travel easier.
13. Clothes to take (sub-sectioned by weather, time of day and activity) and which items pair together to make a full outift (including co-ordinating bag and shoes).
14. Things to buy.
15. Toiletries needed (and those supplied by the hotel)
16. iPod updates.
17. Snacks to take.
18. Things to do at home to before we go eg washing, tidying up etc.
19. People to notify (eg mobile operator, banks)
20. Remaining to-do list before we go.
21. A list of the lists so as to not forget anything.

Now I don't think that's excessive, do you?

Image from Sydney on Sunday

Giving blogging another go

So I thought I'd give this blogging thing a go ... again.

A slight confession - I actually had a blog before. It was a long time ago and I can't even remember the name of it. It was about my latest diet of the time and the blog, very much like most of my diets, had great intentions initially but after a few days petered out to nothing.

I've decided to try keeping a blog again because we're off to Australia in a few weeks and I want to capture everything so that I can look back in future years and remember what an amazing time we had. This is our holiday of a lifetime, we're unlikely to ever have a holiday like this again and I've been researching and planning it in one way or another for about a year!

I've also noticed that my memory is rubbish. I can hardly remember any of my school years, nothing from my childhood and even my uni time is pretty vague! Now I'm not sure if it's just an age thing or whether I've just never really tried to remember but I want to make sure I keep a record of our trip.

So this blog will begin around the planning of the trip - and there's been a lot of that, the holiday itself and then hopefully I'll catch the writing bug and will carry on after we get back.
I want to write about things I love. Now that is mainly food. I follow Nigella Lawson on Twitter (if you don't follow her I highly recommend it @nigella_lawson) and I love the way she posts pictures of the food she's cooked. I also found a wonderful blog on breakfast cafes in Sydney as part of my research. The writer and her family visit a different place for breakfast every Sunday and write a review with pictures, Sydney on Sunday. It was great.

Now Jim and I cannot go out for breakfast every Sunday. Firstly because we don't have the money, secondly because we don't live in a city so local options are limited, thirdly because most Sundays we don't get out of our PJs until lunch time but mainly because our weight watchers leader would not approve! But I like the idea of taking pictures and describing the food we eat, so who knows, I might stick with it in some fashion.

So, please be patient with me whilst I get into this and waffle on a bit!