w3c: February 2007 Archives

Seemingly the people behind the new Lily O' Brien's site were paying attention to my post and the thread over on the webmaster forum. It's a pity that their staff can't be as mature and graceful as Ross, but there's very little we can do about that .... In any case the site now "works" in lynx and the w3c validator is no longer blocked. I have to say "works" as the use of ALT tags etc., is woeful and totally lacking in any semantic basis which would probably cause confusion for a visually impaired user and gives zero benefit in terms of SEO. (Try browsing the site using lynx to see what I mean). Why anyone in their right mind would want to block the w3c validator from accessing their site is beyond me. It makes me wonder what they had to hide. I suspect it was the bad coding, since none of the pages on the site were validating before the posts here and on the forum. With regard to SEO it will be interesting to see what happens. The original site ranked well and was obviously well indexed, as the image below illustrates: As all the inbound links to specific pages etc., are all dead you can expect to see Lily's SERPS being impacted negatively. Whether or not the site will eventually recover remains to be seen, but in its current state it distinctly lacks semantic textual content. Only time will tell.

I've mentioned issues with websites on more than occasion in the past. In some instances the issues have been mildly irritating, whereas in others they have been horrendous. When an ecommerce website basically tells me / my browser to "get lost" because I'm not using Javascript I get rather annoyed. However, for every website that tells users (and their browsers) to go elsewhere there's another that is sitting there welcoming them all in as potential sales. In the case of Irish handmade chocolates this is really obvious. A quick search on Google for "irish handmade chocolates" shows the top three or four companies in the sector: So the 3 main competitors are:

1. Butler's
2. Lily O'Brien's
3. Lir

I happen to like chocolate, so the results don't really surprise me :) Anyway, you could expect the search results to oscillate for certain key phrases. In this particular sampling, however, there is one wildcard - Lily O'Brien's. They're the wildcard for two reasons:

1. They just got a complete redesign which changed ALL the URLs
2. Their site is completely inaccessible to many browsers (and potential clients/customers)

I should be able to access an ecommerce website using ANY browser I choose. I don't expect it to work perfectly in ANY browser, though I would expect it to be functional in the most commonly used ones. I don't think that asking that is too much :) Since I like web standards and the like let's try a little test on all three sites and see what happens: Butler's W3C Validator Test: The HTML on this site is anything but valid, however once you force the w3c validator to deal with it you get a massive 92 errors! The silly thing is that most of the errors could be fixed very easily. They're silly things like missing mimetype declarations for Javascript etc., Lynx Test: The site is usable. Better use of ALT tags would make it a hell of a lot easier to get around, but it does display. Lily O Brien's W3C Validator Test: Failed. Now this is the bit that really got me. Not only did the site fail the test, but it's actually using server-side UserAgent detection AND is basically telling a large number of browsers to "get lost". What's laughable is that even the "get lost we don't like your browser page" doesn't even validate!! How on earth could they put together an error page that doesn't even work properly? No DocType declaration and incorrect HTML markup. Talk about adding insult to injury! Funnily enough the site currently has a good Google PageRank - I'd expect that won't last, as the new site is going to be really hard to traverse with a spider. Lynx: It won't let me view the site! Lir W3C test: Gives 67 errors. As usual most of them are very simple to fix Lynx: Navigable. Not as much content as on the Butler's site, but it's still usable The problem that sites such as Lily's face is that they are basically trying to force people into using what the developers / designers think people should be using. What if I wanted to access those sites using a PDA or my mobile phone? What if I want to use a new funky browser with a UserAgent string that their code doesn't recognise? What if I was using a screen reader? While JAWS may support Javascript I've already seen issues with UIs on several sites, so a site that doesn't have any text (or very little of it) is going to put people off. What about older people with weak eyesite? My grandfather, for example, is over 90 years old. His eyes aren't good. He has to use onscreen magnification to view a lot of sites. If they're using more images than anything else there isn't much for him to see. What if I have money in my pocket and I need to buy chocolates for my girlfriend? Are you going to tell me to go elsewhere simply because you didn't code the site properly? It will be interesting to see how the three sites compare in a few months time when Google has done another dance. Unless Lilly's make some significant changes to their current website layout I would predict that they will be severely penalised by Google et al and that their online sales will suffer as a result