Well, not wishing to leave a good story down (see magazine cover disk blog entry) and having got the latest copy of .net magazine it seemed reasonable to give them the same level attention PC Plus has had.

First off, I like the magazine. It is useful and informative. It is far from perfect though!

It blurbs it’s cover disk is “worth over £350″…. well really…….

One of the more annoying features the magazine has is its “Broadband Top 10” – this is where it advertises the ten best broadband deals in the UK. (Magazines in other countries may be localised, I dont know) However, in a fit of weirdness they dont even come close to a like for like comparison. This means that the “pay as you go” services (having no monthly cost) are always the top of the list, yet the cost of actually using these services can be astronomical. There is no distinction between speed and cost either – so a service which is slower but cheaper gets a better ranking than one which could actually be a better value for money. Data caps are ignored which means that again, cheaper ISPs (with more limits) get a higher ranking.

The end result of this, is that the top ten hasnt really changed in months (pay as you go are always in #1 position for example) and the good service providers who offer realistic speeds with no data caps arent mentioned.

Pretty pointless waste of space in the magazine if you ask me (and you did by coming here….)

The last thing I am going to rant about is the “Site Build Off” article. Before I complain about the .net methodolgy in their experiment, I must say very well done to the over all winner (Hannah King – Freelance designer) who produced by far the nicest site, faster and cheaper than either of the others and did it without using an out of the box solution. You can see the three sites for yourself – www.reflect-design.com/test/netmag_ecommerce, www.branchesdesign.co.uk/oliversorganics, and the winning one – www.thepointbristol.co.uk/organic.

Now, as you can see all three sites are good and well done to everyone. The problem is how .net conducted the experiment. Without spoiling it for people who want to read the article, suffice it to say that they (again) fail to compare like for like. Not only this, but in a test of designing e-commerce sites, they review and determine the “best” by a panel of experts. This (to me) is odd. Surely the only valid way to test an e-commerce design is to get people off the street and see what they think of it. The panelists comments (like “you can tell this is an osCommerce site” etc.) seem just weird. There is a big “so what” attached.

Anyway – I still like the magazine but wish they would move away from the hyping up they do to make their articles seem more interesting. If they could stick to just solid, worthwhile, articles it would be great.