Geek whinge
My major beef with the new Games Workshop website is that it's done with so little care. Time and time again you get the sense the entire thing was put together by lifeless automata. Then you consider the entire site is geared towards acting as a shop, the bit where you buy the product is so careless.
I was in Games Workshop a fortnight ago ordering some items from Mail Order through their website. In an incredible display of bad web design I was trapped in a cycle of pages that only let me cancel or edit my order - not actually purchase it. I was trapped in a recursive loop of pages from which there was no way out. And starting again didn't work either. It utterly bamboozled me, two staff members and finally the shop manager. They resolved the issue by phoning the order through to Mail Order the next day.
But this isn't an isolated bit of bad design. It's all-pervasive. From big things like not enabling you to buy models, to little annoying niggles.
So, you're browsing the site and you come across this funky product:
Aha! You read that description: This boxed set contains 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 1 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 2 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 3 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 4 armour and 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 5 armour,...
There are better ways of writing that sentence. There are conciser ways of writing that sentence. There are more exciting way to write that sentence.
But look at the punctuation at the end of the description - a comma followed by an ellipsis. For starters it's written as three full stops and not the Unicode ellipsis character BUT THAT'S ME BEING INCREDIBLY PEDANTIC.
But the ellipsis indicates there's more to the description. As does that read more button. So you click and you get this extended description:
No, it's not extended, it ends on that awkward comma.
Then you get treated to a selection of gallery of pictures showing the item. This veritable smorgasbord consists:
And:
Poor showing.
That pathetic rant's out my system now. Time to get on with my life. Posted by Curis at 9:00 AM
I was in Games Workshop a fortnight ago ordering some items from Mail Order through their website. In an incredible display of bad web design I was trapped in a cycle of pages that only let me cancel or edit my order - not actually purchase it. I was trapped in a recursive loop of pages from which there was no way out. And starting again didn't work either. It utterly bamboozled me, two staff members and finally the shop manager. They resolved the issue by phoning the order through to Mail Order the next day.
But this isn't an isolated bit of bad design. It's all-pervasive. From big things like not enabling you to buy models, to little annoying niggles.
So, you're browsing the site and you come across this funky product:
Aha! You read that description: This boxed set contains 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 1 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 2 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 3 armour, 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 4 armour and 1 metal Space Marine in Mk 5 armour,...
There are better ways of writing that sentence. There are conciser ways of writing that sentence. There are more exciting way to write that sentence.
But look at the punctuation at the end of the description - a comma followed by an ellipsis. For starters it's written as three full stops and not the Unicode ellipsis character BUT THAT'S ME BEING INCREDIBLY PEDANTIC.
But the ellipsis indicates there's more to the description. As does that read more button. So you click and you get this extended description:
No, it's not extended, it ends on that awkward comma.
Then you get treated to a selection of gallery of pictures showing the item. This veritable smorgasbord consists:
And:
Poor showing.
That pathetic rant's out my system now. Time to get on with my life. Posted by Curis at 9:00 AM
3 Comments:
Heh heh. I applied for the job of web designer/developer at GW about five years ago. I had, at the time, 2.5 years of commercial web dev experience and 8 years of commercial computer systems experience and 5 years of tech support experience, not to mention academic qualifications in English and computers. I had, however, only played WH40K and Blood Bowl for the sum total of seven months.
I was up against a bloke who had no web dev experience, no commercial computer experience and had been playing all GW products for many years.
Guess who got the job? :-)
But guess who was willing to settle for the insultingly low wage on offer?
"There are more exciting way to write that sentence."
There are more grammatically correct ways to write that sentence. ;)
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