You have only your business to lose

Today I want to berate Web applications developers: Ladies and gentlemen, why do you not pay attention to the damn obvious when you let your creations loose on the world?

I’ve written before about Web applications and sites where there’s a serious lack of basic data that provides credibility – for instance, putting a date on a blog posting or a Web site article or giving the version number of the product or service you’re covering. What annoys me about this is simple; you have to give readers benchmarks to position your comments in time and understand where and to what your comments relate to, but the negligent omission of both data points is a recipe for failure.

But leaving out the basic data is nothing to the far more egregious and negligent omission of not handling site exceptions. In this newsletter I was planning to write about a scheduling service called Scheduling.net.

Scheduling.net is a service that claims it can manage scheduling for up to 40 employees over up to seven shifts. The problem I found was that the service seemed to be having major problems with every form I filled in for registration and login (I tried both Firefox on OS X as well as Firefox and IE on Windows).

Over a period of about three hours, for every form I submitted the service returned the peculiar error message “onComplete Expetion Handler 0 undefined.” Now, of course I understand that new services can experience problems, but guys, at least make sure that you know when things are screwed up for over three hours and do something about it. Oh, and make sure you spell your error messages right!

But Scheduling.net is not the only culprit. I look at what seems to be an endless parade of Web applications, and for many there’s an obvious lack of care that just amazes me. This is a basic quality control issue guys! When you get your spelling or grammar wrong it is bad enough, but when your service generates exceptions on something as basic as registering or logging on you have really screwed up big time.

So, here’s my list of things you have to do to be taken seriously:

1. Check your spelling and grammar. It really isn’t hard to find someone who can proofread.

2. Make sure that your site shows dates and/or version numbers when you are discussing a product or service.

3. Make sure that when your site generates an exception that you detect and report it to yourself immediately! Ideally you should never be unable to capture a registrant’s data including their e-mail address so that if something goes wrong you can start doing damage control.

Guys, it isn’t hard. I was going to suggest that you engineer your systems to respond as you would want someone else’s system to respond to you, but obviously that isn’t the way you think.

So here’s the bottom line: If you want to be successful make sure you have people on your staff who understand the need to keep customers happy and satisfied. If you don’t, well, you have only your business to lose.