This article is the March 2017 issue of the monthly series that started with “The Sorry State of the Web in 2016“, showing all kinds of blunders on websites ranging from the silly to the insecure and illegal. While I spot a good number of these myself, many are brought to my attention by contributors, and I would like to thank them all.

JobsPlus

JobsPlus, which is the ridiculous new name for what used to be ETC, had launched a new website as part of their rebranding.

Despite that, their content still can’t handle apostrophes, not to mention basic formatting such as bulleted lists:

At least, it was built with internationalisation in mind. In fact, you can choose a language…

…with a single selection of English. That’s very useful indeed!

JobsPlus also have a service where they send a daily email with all new vacancies. Typically there are no new vacancies during weekends, but they still send an empty email. This has been going on for around 10 years if not more (formerly as ETC, of course).

Henley Malta

The Henley MBA might teach you many useful things, but building a basic website is definitely not one of these!

In fact, here are two basic things you should never have on your website:

1. Broken images
2. Misleading links that unexpectedly open your email application.

Just Some Coding

The only thing worse than a misleading link is something that looks like a link but is not, as you can see on Just Some Coding Ltd‘s website.

There are many ways to emphasise text on the web, but underlining is not a good one. Underlining is usually associated with a link, so when you see big green underlined text like “art” or “functional”, the typical user might try to click on it, only to realise that it’s not actually a link.

Maypole

Maypole is yet another website insecurely accepting credit card information:

Secured by Thawte indeed, but there’s no padlock. We’ve been through this several times before and I won’t bore you by repeating the details, but refer back to “The Sorry State of the Web in 2016” if you don’t understand why this is bad.

MFSA Registry

Let’s also welcome the MFSA Registry into the the realm of oft-repeated security issues, in this case that of having an untrusted SSL certificate:

As if that wasn’t enough, the same website also accepts login details over an insecure connection:

Bank Cross-Origin Issue

I recently caught some functionality in a local bank’s webite that was completely broken because of this cross-origin problem:

That’s not nice to have in a production environment.

Owner’s Best

Owner’s Best recently launched a new website, and not without issues. Until the time of writing this article, you can still see “Error: Rows Not Set” at the bottom of the page:

At one time, I was checking out a particular property, and they have these buttons on the side where you can see the floor plan and other details:

When clicking one of these buttons, however, I was taken to this contact form:

I was really confused by the fact that this contact form came up instead of the floor plan I was expecting, and the back button wasn’t working either.

What actually happened was this: the contact form is actually right below the property detail shown in the earlier screenshot, so properties that don’t have additional info will cause those buttons to link to an empty anchor, which has the side effect of bringing the contact form to the top of the page. The least they could have done is hide the buttons if the relevant detail is not there for the current property.

Roller Blades Malta

There’s one important lesson we can take away from Roller Blades Malta: don’t enter website content when you’re drunk.

Star Web Malta

Woe be upon thee, if thou hast an invalid WoeID:

Transport Malta

We all love Transport Malta, and for those who want to actually communicate their love, they have a contact form (note also the messed up action / social media list on the side):

Unfortunately, however, they don’t want to receive your love. The contact form goes to this page:

Transport Malta also joins the list of websites that accept login details on an insecure channel:

TVM

TVM‘s website, unlike that of JobsPlus, is in both English and Maltese. However, they forgot to translate “Sign In / Register” in the Maltese version:

WhatsOn

whatson.com.mt is another website accepting login details over an insecure channel:

Before you can login or register, though, you have to get past the cookie-acceptance text that comes up in front of the login/register form. This text tells you that you have to accept cookie usage to proceed, but the site has already set cookies regardless of your acceptance.

Xamarin University

When you sign up for Xamarin University, you have to consent to Microsoft to spam you.

While they say that you can unsubscribe at any time, I don’t want Microsoft sending me trash in the first place.

I also was unable to access some of the site’s functionality, because their JavaScript was broken:

Summary

We’ve seen quite a few bad things in this article, and I have even more lined up for the April issue. As always, feel free to bring to my attention any blunders you have experienced and feel should be included.

I have summarised various points to improve upon in earlier articles, and feel there would be little benefit by repeating them in this one.

However, I just want to remind everyone why I am writing these articles: it’s not to put shame on any particular website, but to learn about the bad things on the web today and avoid repeating them in the future. These experiences are painful to visitors of such websites, and embarrassing for the website developers and the companies commissioning them. Let’s all learn from our mistakes and create a better web for all!