'It's getting better' says Homebase after Which? slams website

[The Medway Handyman]

"Which? placed Homebase.co.uk 92nd out of the 96 shopping websites in a study in which over 14,000 consumers took part. B&Q's DIY.com fared even worse, coming 95th".

time I looked the Homobase site didn't list plywood :-)

"Homebase head of multi-channel Andy McWilliams has promised that the company is sprucing up its act.

"We realise how important the multi-channel experience is for our customers, and have made a number of important steps to improve the customer journey," he said".

The problem seems to be that Homobase employ people as "head of multi-channel" who say things like "the multi-channel experience" and "improve the customer journey".

No surprise that the B&Q site came 95th out of 96 though.

[polygonum]

Given how bad both of those are, who managed to get positions 96 to 100?

I'd put a vote for Boots.

[Brian Gaff]

What do you think of the CPC Farnell one, Seems to me that no matter what you look for you get lots of stuff you were not expecting. Indeed I'm finding most commerce sites seem to not have much in the way of an obvious plan, they are just a template with stuff thrown into them and far too many links buttons etc on a given page to actually take it all in.

Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

Not very good, relies on client side javascript to function.

By several people who don't know anything about the items they are shoving into the database so similar items don't placed into the same categories.

But I'd rather be given slightly more hits than not be shown anything when you *know* the item is there somewhere as you found it with a search yesterday...

There does seem to be growing tendancy to have a great row of icons/links to "like" something in faceache, twaddle, inkedout, goggle etc etc. Why FFS?

[meow2222]

I've long lost count of the number of websites where I've gone to buy and g= iven up. So many are truly hopeless, more or less all the rest are crap. Th= e funny thing is its so easy to fix them, but it doesn't get done. I guess = the ego of the web designer rules supreme, and companies aren't willing to = pay for a few hours a week to make their site properly usable.

NT

[tony sayer]

In article , [e-mail] scribeth thus

+1

+1 again!...

[Halmyre]

__=AD___________________________________

g3ns.351249$ [e-mail]...

I use Farnell and RS and find them slow and frustrating to use.

-- Halmyre

[Tim Watts]

Nah - it is because a lot of the managers are poorly educated and rely on what the insultant tells them or are swayed by "bling" when anyone with

1/2oz of technical savvy and some common sense could see for themselves what's right and wrong with a website.

The only factors that would not hold true for this are site reliability and speed under load - and I would expect a sensible manager to specify ongoing monitoring on both counts.

So in short, it's the thicckies' fault...

Lots of small companies, especially tech shops, have fantastic sites and there are quite a few big sites that are well done.

[Tim Watts]

Yes...

Exactly. Those things are for news sites and blogs where you may very well want to ping an item to your social circle. In fact I now feed systems updates and outage noticed to my users via a blog (we do not have managed desktops so an "motd" will not work). All updates can be viewed on the web and monitored via RSS and Twitter (which contains a tiny url link back to the post). Plenty of choice for staying upto date and I do not have to spam the internal mailing list 20 times a week. AFAIAC that is an optimum usage case for Twitter, with alternatives for people who would rather die before they sign up.

But do my G+ circles want to be pinged for a 22mm brass olive at 29p?

[Tim Watts]

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Both are great for parametric searching of some items - seems to be specialist devices like optoelectrionics.

But some items, eg mains extention leads are a complete bastard to find. I usually use Google from outside to locate those sorts of items...

[Martin Brown]

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messagenews:9g3ns.351249$ [e-mail]...

Try Rapidonline they are usually cheaper and faster but on a more restricted range of parts. Anything common they have in stock. They will also sell you smaller numbers of bits than RS or Farnell.

Dismissing that annoying RS John mither always gets me.

Generally I want to search with boolean logical expressions like

200>Vce>160 or 10 > Imax > 2 for component search. I don't want to have to click a damn button for every value of Vce or Imax in their database.

[Jonathan]

I always use Google to search the site if that is my problem. It works quite often and is usually better than their search engine.

Jonathan

[stuart noble]

One would have thought they could borrow staff from Kingfisher. The Screwfix site seems to work well enough. Not as simple as that I expect

[whisky-dave]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Must be one of those employed because they have a degree in something that's useless.

I'm suprised it did that well :)

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, I suspect this is revenue generating as if someone likes it you can obviously see the adverts worked so the part of the company getting money from adverts can hike up its advert rates accordingly. I hate them all before the items though, how can you like anything you have not got to yet?

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I'd be happier if there was a hate or death to stupid web designers button myself.

Brian

[Sam Plusnet]

Probably because the nipple, who should have been designing their system and structuring it properly, spent all their time bimbling around on faceache etc. instead.

[Brian Gaff]

Probably called it laminated bonded wood products...

Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, its more a reflection that people believe that a mention on facecloth will net more business than actually having a decent product.

The horrifying reality is that they are probably right.

[Nightjar]

On 09/11/2012 10:25, [e-mail] wrote: ...

given up. So many are truly hopeless, more or less all the rest are crap. The funny thing is its so easy to fix them, but it doesn't get done. I guess the ego of the web designer rules supreme, and companies aren't willing to pay for a few hours a week to make their site properly usable.

IME, it is often the ecommerce software that restricts what you can do with the web site. By the time I found one that probably could do what I wanted I was virtually finished with online selling. Now my cousin has bought a couple of hotels and I need to start over again, looking for suitable, but preferably inexpensive (i.e hundreds rather than thousands of pounds), hotel management software that can be integrated with online bookings for him.

Colin Bignell