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.