It seems that Lion Breweries have unlocked a real pandora's box of woes with
its new blokes' site at
fireengine.co.nz.
As I predicted yesterday, its content has offended some -- with several Aardvark
readers writing to express their concerns.
What's more, the guys over at
emale.co.nz are busy
refuting Fire Engine's claims to be the first online magazine for men. The
emale blokes reckon they've been doing this for some time now and, just looking
at the front page of their site, they appear to at least have better web design
behind them.
How Dumb Is This?
Building an effective ecommerce site is not a trivial task -- but the basics
aren't rocket science.
Having said that -- I bet the guys who run
eretail.net.nz
probably couldn't launch a skyrocket let alone understand the basics of
building a sensible website.
Not only is this site lumbered with a trashy Flash intro screen that does
nothing except waste the visitor's time, but it also manages to crash my
otherwise very robust Netscape 4 browser every time the next page starts to
load. That's sort of like ankle-tapping prospective customers and throwing
them back out on the street.
But wait -- there's more!
Casting aside my obviously incompatible Netscape, I fired up my trusty
old reliable Opera browser and, after waiting almost forever for what appeared
to be about 100Kbytes of data to download...
this is what I got
I suspect that those nice folks over at
NZ Post are unlikely
to be too impressed with
this page
on the eretail.net.nz website.
Repeat after me -- "framing another site's content dilutes its branding and
really pisses them off."
I hope this emphasizes exactly why we need to make sure that those who
came away from the government's ecommerce summit fired up and ready to get
into doing business over the Net don't have their dreams dashed by
substandard advice and implementations.
The Weekly
Yes, I know the first edition of the weekly has yet to appear -- but I'm
still working on it.
Hopefully (if current leads pan out) it will include a very interesting expose'
into the astoundingly bad behaviour of a group of local "new economy" company
directors (some of who are also on the board of a public company). Just how
competent and ethical are the managers of some of our hi-tech public companies?
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