Over the past couple of days I've highlighted just how bad some of our
ecommerce-enabled websites are and a couple of people have suggested
to me that it's mainly because they're pre-launch or small players
so it's unreasonable to expect too much.
Well I'd like to believe that but...
If you were an avid punter, keen to check out the
TAB's website on Melbourne
cup day you might not have been too impressed.
The TAB can hardly be considered "a small player" in the online commerce area,
having a turnover with more digits in it than a toll-call to Botswana.
Of course Melbourne Cup day meant the TAB site got lots of traffic -- so they
modified the front page a little to indicate this. Unfortunately what they
didn't do was check those modifications properly so if you were using
Netscape's browser,
this is what you got. Not
very impressive eh?
At least Internet Explorer users
got this. Why discriminate
against Netscape users?
Not exactly what I'd expect from a top-line e-commerce site that admits to
generating significant overseas revenues.
Then there's Clear's new
Ztalk site which is trying
to use a secure certificate that confuses some browsers -- hence
this warning.
Now, if I wasn't clued-up enough to work out what was going on here I'd likely
be more than a little concerned that my browser was warning me about something
to do with security. "Is this a virus? Am I being hacked?" are the kind of
questions that the average Net user might ask themselves -- and promptly
backtrack out of there.
So, the ecommerce cock-ups are not just the domain of the little guys who
can't afford to hire top-gun consultants and web developers.
It strikes me that ecommerce is presently at the same point general web design
was some three or four years ago. Lots of people are rushing in to "be there"
but far too many are simply ignoring the basics -- like having your site properly
checked before it's launched and implementing good, solid operations procedures.
What do you think? Are our standards too low?
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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