I first visited Ireland around this time eight years ago, for St. Patrick’s Day 2012. It did not take me long to fall in love with the place. Since then, I have revisited Ireland other times, lived there for about a year and a half, and been around most of the country. As a result, my Irish experience has been a mixture of thrills and disappointments.

When I recently revisited Ireland around the same time that the Coronavirus outbreak started, I once again had mixed feelings. Many things were really nice, but I wasn’t spared any disappointments.

As part of the Sorry State of the Web series, in which I promote good web development practices by illustrating bad ones, I will focus on websites (and other technology services) I came across during my research for this trip. Other things that annoyed me, such as cafes charging you an extra 2 Euros just to toast your sandwich, will be out of scope.

Aran Islands

The Aran Islands may be beautiful, but their website could have been better.

In fact, they did make it better by fixing this problem with ampersand HTML entities showing within the page.

Insecure WiFi at Penneys

Penneys, the chain of department stores that you might otherwise recognise as Primark in the UK, offers free WiFi to their customers.

Unfortunately, given that you need to join the WiFi via an endpoint that does not come with a proper SSL certificate, it is not only useless, but plain risky for customers to use.

Secret Valley Wildlife Park

The Secret Valley Wildlife Park website has a number of issues.

For starters, some of the links at the bottom (i.e. Terms & Conditions, Privacy, and Cookies) don’t work. The cursor doesn’t even turn into a pointer, and if you look at the HTML, it seems they put anchor tags without href attributes.

On the Animals page, images take ages to load because they used huge images in the page without using thumbnails (see also: The Shameful Web of April 2017 (Part 1)). If you’re including large images in a page, always use small versions and link to the larger version.

There also seems to be a problem with HTTPS… we’ll get to that too.

Going on the online booking system (which is what we care about when it comes to HTTPS, since sensitive information is involved), we see that HTTPS looks okay so far. They also used to have a test ticket type that I’m happy to see has been removed. In fact, they recently updated this page with a plea for funds since Coronavirus is messing up their business (understandably).

Unfortunately, when you proceed to the next step and are about to book a ticket, the connection suddenly isn’t secure any more. It’s a small mixed content problem because of an image, but the problem is that it undermines the trust that people have in such websites (when it comes to keeping their sensitive financial data secure), and can potentially have security-related consequences.

So while I sympathise with Secret Valley (and so many others affected by the Coronavirus), it’s also important to keep your data safe. By all means, send them money, but do it using alternative, secure means.

The M50 Toll

If you’re going to be renting a car in Dublin and using it to drive around the country, one of the things you’re going to have to do is pay the toll on the M50 motorway. The M50 uses a barrier-free toll system that can be paid online by 8pm on the next day.

While the close deadline is a little annoying, being able to pay it online is quite convenient… when it works.

In this case, the system just didn’t want to work, although I tried several times. This can happen, but what is a little worrying here is that I don’t think those details about the error (the XML-like thing) should be disclosed to the customer.

Blackrock Castle Observatory

If you like science, then Blackrock Castle Observatory is a great place to visit. They have a lot of interactive exhibits that explain concepts from astronomy and science in general:

Wait… what’s that at the bottom-right, where the arrow is pointing? Let’s take a closer look:

Uh oh… someone didn’t activate Windows! That’s quite embarrassing, and can be seen on several of their exhibits.

Wrap Up

Although Ireland will always have a special place in my heart, it hasn’t spared me any disappointments, both in terms of the service I received in various places as a tourist, but also on websites and other technology-related services.

This article, like others in the same series, is an educational exercise aimed at improving technology standards, especially on the web which so many people come in contact with. The aim is to learn from this and provide a better service, so I hope that nobody is offended, particularly in this difficult time.

Instead, I hope that in such times, when we depend on technology so much more, we can overcome these obvious problems and use technology safely and reliably to reduce the burden of living in a difficult situation as much as possible.

With the Coronavirus currently devastating health, economy, tourism and peace of mind across the world, we need to be safe, help each other, and show empathy because so many people are affected in different ways.

A few years ago, I ran the Sorry State of the Web series of articles to promote good web design/development practices by pinpointing shameful ones that should be avoided (an approach inspired by Web Pages That Suck).

Websites today are very different from when Vincent Flanders started Web Pages That Suck. Things like Mystery Meat Navigation are almost gone entirely, as modern websites embrace more minimal designs and are often built on foundations such as Bootstrap or Material Design.

However, after a series of very frustrating experiences today while trying to buy a mobile phone, I am convinced that the state of professionally-built websites has not really improved. Websites may have converged to similar designs that overall are less painful, but the user experience is still miserable because of a lack of professionalism.

As a result, although I would have preferred not to continue this series, I feel there is still value in doing so. In this article, we will focus on websites of companies that sell mobile phones in Malta, where the technology and customer service are both still very medieval.

Sound Machine

Let’s start with Sound Machine. When you first visit this site, you get one of those cookie notices at the bottom-left. That’s pretty normal, especially in the GDPR era.

However, part of this notice sticks around even after you close it. It’s particularly noticeable if you scroll down so that the background is uniformly dark:

This is pretty strange, and probably unintended. But wait… do you notice something in that dark footer area? That’s right — this website was made by none other than Cyberspace Solutions, to which I had dedicated an entire article 3 years ago. I guess this explains a lot.

Another little mistake can be found in their Cookie Policy, where someone has been a little careless with their HTML tags:

But the worst blunder of all is that the Contact form does not even work:

In fact, when you press the Send button, a spinner runs next to it and never stops. There is no indication of the failure, unless you open the Developer Console, which most people obviously will not know how to do.

The result of this is a poor user experience, because (a) the form does not work, (b) there is no indication that anything failed, and, to make matters worse, (c) there is no email address given as an alternative. A customer therefore has no option other than to give them a call or show up in person, which many prefer to avoid for various reasons.

The takeaway from this is that when you build a website, you should always double-check to make sure things look right and that things actually work. Customers aren’t very happy when they don’t.

Direct Vision

Direct Vision has a nice e-commerce website where you can look for products and eventually buy them online. Let’s say I’m interested in the Samsung Galaxy A40… I get a lot of options:

Let’s take a look at the black phone on the left:

Great! It seems to be in stock!

Except that… it isn’t! It turns out that this phone is not available at all in one of their shops, and in the other, it’s only available in a couple of colours (Coral and White). The black one, as it turns out, is not in stock. They need to order it.

So why do they say that it is in stock when it isn’t? The salesgirl tried to give a dumb explanation, and also suggested I go with one of the other colours and get a cover to hide the undesired colour. Naturally, I didn’t buy that (pun intended). It’s truly shameful to waste people’s time in this way.

Tablets and More

Tablets and More is another consumer electronics store. Browsing around, it’s easy to notice a few things out of place. For instance, the thing at the bottom left that fails to load:

…and which, after a few seconds, becomes something else but still fails to explain what it’s supposed to be:

Even the product descriptions seem to be a real mess…

…in what appears to be a copy & paste job from GSM Arena:

What shall we say, then, about the creepy practices of harvesting people’s email addresses via the live chat feature (something that is becoming increasingly common in live chat products nowadays) or of not displaying prices and expecting people to get in touch to find out how much an item costs?

It’s almost as if this store is intentionally doing everything it can to keep customers away.

Phone Box

The minute you land at Phone Box, you can immediately tell that something is wrong:

If a site isn’t being served over HTTPS, then it’s possible for requests to be intercepted by a man in the middle and arbitrary responses served as a result, as Troy Hunt demonstrates in his article about HSTS. This is particularly risky for websites that require you to submit information, and Phone Box does indeed fall in this category:

As I’ve written ad nauseam throughout the Sorry State of the Web series, it is not okay to accept login credentials insecurely over HTTP. While other information being sent insecurely may or may not fall under GDPR and Data Protection laws, I think we would be a lot more comfortable if such details (such as one’s personal address) are not leaked to the world.

At least, this site does not take credit card details, since the only payment method available is cash upon delivery. Let’s hope they don’t decide to accept credit cards as a new feature.

Conclusion

Even from a small sample of websites, we have seen a range of issues going from simple negligent oversights to serious security problems and broken features. In 2020, businesses are still paying a lot of money for web design agencies to do a half-assed job. They probably do not realise how much business they are losing as a result.

How can we make things better? I have a few ideas.

• Web design agencies: test your website’s functionality and content thoroughly. Get up to speed with the latest security and data protection requirements, as there may be legal repercussions if you don’t.
• Businesses: choose very carefully who to work with when building a website. Take a look at their past work, and get a second opinion if you don’t feel you can evaluate it. Make it easy for customers to reach you and give them a good service. Otherwise, don’t complain that you are losing business to online marketplaces such as Amazon.
• Customers: do not buy from businesses that have insecure websites, shady practices, or salespeople who think you’re stupid. Things will only change when they notice that their behaviour is detrimental to their own survival.