Jim's Blog

Snarky feedback

I've got less and less patience for companies that don't have a good website. I'm understanding if you're a small business if you don't have much - a single page with some contact info is a good start. It doesn't matter to me how much content you have, as long as it works. Quality over quantity.

Today I was trying to use a website of a company that, according to wikipedia, had 100's of billions of dollars of revenue in 2008 internationally. For companies of that size, your site better freaking work. It didn't. They made heavy use of javascript popups, frames, and other javascript (instead of just a link). But here's the thing: none of the js worked. It didn't work on my mac in FF or safari. It didn't work on XP in FF or IE 6. It was just broken. For the main "try out our wizard!" feature, I couldn't get past step #1. The whole "find out more about our special plan" link didn't work. I tried to use their website, I really did.

Thankfully their site has a feedback form that I could find (unlike some places) and the form actually worked. It's sad, but I was surprised that it did. I sent them snarky feedback and outlined all the steps that I went though to try to get the information I was looking for our their site before giving up. Even if your site isn't going to have 5 9's of uptime, or have automated testing or anything else, do at least a manual smoke test in some browsers in some OS's. Anything less is just unprofessional.