Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

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I couldn't help but look at the Fruugo website - and I can't say I'm very impressed by the web design!

I have a list of issues:

1. When I went to the Australian website, even though I'd started in the U.S. website (which uses pretty much the same layout), it was a slow load time.

2. Massive image in the centre, but my first immediate thought was "that's a large ad in the middle of this site!". then I realised it was meant to be there...

3. The fonts are strange choices. There are three different fonts I can see here (Times New Roman?!?) I can see over 5 font colours here, one of which is lime green on a white background.

4. Massive amounts of non-minified inline javascript... what were they thinking?

5. They seem to have done a lot of work on a global marketplace, but their tag line is "Europe's marketplace".

6. They use Java sessions, even when I go to the main page for the very first time!

7. Half the international links don't work! For instance, I try to go to Fruugo Luxemberg, and I got the following URL:

http://www.fruugo.lu;jsessionid=jghldhzrqq2mbw0vvnwo.webshop...

For €40 Million, could they not have done some basic link checking?

I have to say, this is not very good :(

You say all of that, but imagine how much money they saved by not hiring expensive top-talent.

They hired extremely expensive top management instead.

They saved some more - I give my criticism entirely for free :-)

Some other usability observations: the hover menu system on the left has what http://uxmovement.com/navigation/why-hover-menus-do-users-mo... calls a 'hover tunnel.' "Hover tunnels are passages that users have to tunnel their mouse through to click a menu item." The Mac did this correctly in the 1980s.

I thought that the massive image in the center was be like a shelf, where you could see things they were promoting, and click on them. But if you click on an item you get an entire category (which was entirely missing for one thing I clicked on), and have to search again for the thing which caught your eye.

Oh dear... in other words, not optimized for tablets. I looked at this on my iPad, and when I pressed the menu, it expanded it, but then immediately navigated to that page.

The way you and the article describe it, it sounds a bit like the boo.com fiasco:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com

Oh, hold on a second. If you try to join on the US website, they are using a fruugo.com site certificate, but the domain I'm navigating in is fruugo.us

https://www.fruugo.us/auth/register.htm

Gives me a nice big Firefox webpage telling me that I'm viewing an untrusted connection.

There's some weird HTML in the page...

  <script type="text/html" id="template_pulseItem">
	<![CDATA[

  <$
	var textTranslations = {
  .
  etc.
  .

Any idea what this is?

CDATA means XML, most likely. See http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp

Actually, that is also used in SGML. Doesn't make any sense for it to be there! Certainly there's no XML that I can see being processed in the page.

uninterpreted templating script?

Oh, it gets better: try searching for something in the top part of the nav then play hide and seek with the auto-complete items. Classically bad JS. Maybe it's for IE only?

When browsing product categories, the page title says "Search results for ''". For €40 million, you could check for empty strings.

This site looks like it's made for 2002 interwebs at best

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