Few things annoy me more than bad web site design. I want to give people money, I want to buy their products, but if I can’t research the product on your website or I can chuck it in a shopping cart and order it, chances are I will never bother spending money with you and will be annoyed your web site for wasting my time. And then I’ll blog about it because I’m angsty.
Harvey Norman New Zealand – A terrible website that tells you to download their catalog or you can flip through a scanned pop-up copy that does not even show enough detail to read the text of the ad! There’s no online ordering facility at all. Completely and utterly awful.
Overclockers – A nice company based in New Zealand offering good computer gear. Shame about the website. Red on black text? Hello, MySpace want their 13 year olds back! At least the shopping cart works I guess.
Reading Cinemas – For a long time this site was completely broken in Firefox and IE. You could simply not get film listings or times to display. Now, they’ve repaired it (took a couple of months) and have a great scheme where you can sign up for ‘rewards’ in return for most of your personal information. Hmm. What makes this dubious offer worse is that when you do sign up, they send a confirmation email which includes your login and password in plain text! Now, I don’t use the same password for everything, but I do use the same password for ‘junky’ things like signing up to crappy websites. It’s good to know any bored admin can access mail logs on the many servers between here and Reading and check out my password too!
ASB Bank – Their login page involve a simple one-step login process. In the UK many banks moved to a two-step process involving a user name and password as well as a drop down asking you to select a letter from your user name. This step was designed to defeat key-loggers, which are heavily used by East European criminal gangs in particular. No such sophistication for New Zealand banking customers.
Second Life is an interesting, challenging, unique environment. At least, that’s what I try and tell my friends, game-devs and some journalists I know. But what do they actually see in-world? Porn, shops, fetishists and casinos. Where’s all the potential of an alternate universe? Where’s the joy of creative human creativity unleashed and without limits? And I’m not talking collars, chains and whips!
