Wine merchants

I wanted to buy wine, I have bought wine before from Virgin Wines and so went to their site and tried to log in, and failed to log in, so I assumed I had forgotten my password and requested that it was emailed to me. This action resulted in them deleting my card details from my account in case the password fell into the wrong hands, which is fair enough – I shouldn’t have forgotten the password! However, new password in hand, I still couldn’t log in. It is then that it dawns on me that I’m not getting any error message, it just fails … so I click on the blue e and fire up Internet Explorer, and log in.

Gah! In a strop with Virgin Wines, I refuse to even look at their collection of tasty reds and head off to Laithwaites, which looks most peculiar in Firebird because the stylesheet doesn’t appear to load. Did their design agency not think to look at the site in a few browsers before launching it? The entire stylesheet not loading is hardly a minor problem. 10 points to the poster who can spot the connection between this marvellous example and the one in my previous rant.

So I still haven’t bought any wine 🙁

3 Comments

Ben January 1, 2001 Reply

Please try this site and would be grateful for feedback on “customer friendliness” ease of use etc.,
regards

http://www.winedirectuk.co.uk

Drew McLellan January 1, 2001 Reply

My word, that’s diabolical. I suggest you employ the services of a professional web designer.

Tim January 1, 2001 Reply

Laithwaites have gone to the trouble of creating an XHTML 1.0 Transitional site (with xml prolog!), but because they’re using a dynamically-generated css file (why? surely a periodic file build with cron would do?) which doesn’t send the right mime type, Firebird doesn’t render the CSS.

It seems that many MS-server-based webdev houses go all MS-only at the client too, never testing on anything but IE…

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