Following up on an old article on this, where I pointed out the “issues” I had with .net’s e-commerce challenge… (read the original article)

Recently I got an email from Phil (www.branchesdesign.co.uk) about the write up we did, and largely he agrees with what we said. He also pointed out some things we missed – but generally it supported the “concern” that the software match off was a bit biased.

He said:

I found your site whilst looking through my stats and found you linking to the .Net demo site we did for Olivers Organics using ‘out of the box Actinic’. I have to agree with you whole-heartedly. The so- called panel of ‘experts’ at .Net just… wasn’t! I don’t understand why they just didn’t have a wander outside their offices and grab 10 people off the street to have a review session.

I couldn’t agree more. That would have been a MUCH better idea, and really would have actually provided some insight for other developers.

Whilst I agree that Hannah’s {the “winning” entry} design was very nice indeed, it did appear as though some of these ‘experts’ didn’t even look at all of the sites in much detail. For instance, on ours a reviewer said there was no special offer on the home page. In the screen grab accompanying the review it can be seen! Oh dear.

The winning web site was evry nice – we said that the first time round, although on subsequent comparisons I am not really still sure it deserved to win. I had missed the special offer thing – but it is a good example of the problem with using industry “experts” to review a site.

.Net’s credibility, unfortunately, took a bit of a nose-dive in my estimations. Still, we haven’t done too badly out of it with lots of hits to the Organics site… c’est la vie.

Sadly, I cant really say I ever gave .net much “credibility” as far as its experiments go (it could have a whole site of bad science…) 🙂 It is good that it has generated traffic – the organics website (http://www.branchesdesign.co.uk/oliversorganics/) is very good, as is the designers site – www.branchesdesign.co.uk. It gives a feeling of “Cosmic Justice” to think that, despite the poor structure of .net’s code-off the entrants are getting some reward!

On an unfortunate note, this month’s .net magazine shows they refuse to learn from their mistakes and have set aside the best part of six pages for a “bad science” special. The article is about how a website has 50 miliseconds to make an impact… Now, I am sure .net are just faithfully repeating a research abstract but they should know better. Without going into too much detail about how this article is really not much more than a “filler”, I will highlight one question – when does the time start? From when you click a link to when the page renders is going to be about 100 times longer than that – even for a well optimised page on a LAN. It is an example of a farcial headline grabbing statement, which then descends into a mediocre peice about web design.