"If you want to make enemies, try to change something." - Woodrow Wilson (The dooyoo Redesign)

Member Name: ILoveJackDaniels

Product:	The dooyoo Redesign
Date:	01/09/02 (176 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plenty of Potential, Still time to rectify the mistakes made so far

Disadvantages: Badly Launched, Poorly Coded, Insecure

It is difficult for me to imagine, in any World or under any circumstances, just how it would be possible for a web-design professional to launch an incomplete site. It's bad enough when people do that for their own home pages, and cover their little areas of the web in "Under Construction" signs and pictures of their cat, but when the people responsible for a company website put an incomplete site on the web, you know there is something amiss.

Before I start ranting about what I think of the relaunch, I should probably establish my credentials as a web site critic. I have been designing web sites for around 10 years, and professionally for about 4 of those, of which 2 years have been for my own company. I have had the pleasure of launching and running a large range of sites, some large in their own right, and have helped to run countless others. I have seen the rise and fall of many of them, and helped along the way. I'm one of those lucky people whose hobby is also his job. I even own snowboarding shorts :).


The 'new' dooyoo is, on the face of it, quite cool. I like a lot of the features they have included, and that they have said will come later. The site is obviously much more consumer oriented, and they have removed many of the things that made it feel like a community site, to help them achieve this goal, though they seem to have been rather over-enthusiastic with the cutting scissors.

I am a touch confused as to why they call their new navigation 'incredible' and 'shrinking', when it seems to be very much a basic navigation system than many other people achieve without the need to reload a page every time you click. A good idea though, and that's what I like about it. Maybe a little more thought could have gone into it - for example, pop-up menus (check out msn.com's black menus if you don't know what I mean by that) could easily have achieved the same thing, without t

he need for so much page reloading.

The overall layout is a little blander than the previous version of the site, though not without its strengths. I like that the search box has been moved (and now works considerably faster). I hate that they have removed the log in box on every page, along with the current miles and reads totals - both excellent ideas that should have been retained. And that peach is possibly the most horrible thing I have ever seen next to green, though by itself it probably looks rather good.

I am disturbed by the lack of thought and obvious lack of testing that has gone into the new look. Every web designer I have ever met, when dealing with a large project, starts work on paper. Planning is imperative if you want to ensure a site is successfully designed, and to make sure you foresee all small problems. A to-do list is also essential. It is a common occurrence to be in the middle of writing some super-script to take over the World, that you realise you have forgotten to put a title on a different page. You can't just stop doing the script, especially if you are in the middle of it - so you write down 'title needs changing on such-and-such page', and do it later.

Before you launch your site, you go through that list and make sure every single thing on it has been done. If they aren't done, you launch later. The same goes for testing - large sites need it, and cannot get away without it. It is obvious when a company skimps on testing to save themselves some cash by just launching anyway and hoping to wing it. This is one area where I am confused. Dooyoo has a large, very dedicated membership, a large number of whom would have been happy to test the site for them - yet didn't use them...

Within one hour of using the site, I had a list of bugs as long as my arm, and sent them to dooyoo. One hour. If they didn't want to use members to test the site behind the scenes, why did one or two of

them not spend a day on the site writing down problems? They could have posted test ops, rated them, left comments and more. They could have logged in - and each of these would have highlighted problems with the basic functionality of the site, that should have been fixed BEFORE TESTING, let along before launch.

There are other rules to good web design. Basic ones. Sites should load fast. According to research carried out over the last few years, your average web user will wait 30 seconds for a page to load, and the average user is getting more impatient too. A 150k website takes about 30 seconds to load on a 56k modem (the average). Webmasters will VERY rarely leave a site with a 30 second download time, few of them being happy with anything above 12 seconds (60k). To put this in perspective - dooyoo's front page (remember the significance of this - FRONT PAGE - and this is a consumer resource) is around 111k, and uses 7 server connections - bringing the load time for the front page of the site to almost exactly 30 seconds to load - very slow, by most standards, and pushing to the limit of time people will wait for just one page.

A second major rule is what we refer to a cross-browser compatibility. You are currently using a browser to read this review - but you may not be aware that there are a huge number of programs out there that people use to browse. There are three main ones, however, that any good web designer will try and cater for - Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera (Note: AOL is based on Internet Explorer, just with the colour settings messed up).

Now, a website relies on visitors. The more visitors, the better - you never know which one of your visitors will be the next one to buy from one of your affiliates and make you some cash - so you have to cater to everyone. If you have 4 visitors a week, don't worry about cross-browser compatibility, but if you have around 200,000, you need to pay attention t
o it.
Microsoft and Netscape have a share of 99% of the browser market. Opera has about 0.5% share of the browser market. But dooyoo are not supporting Opera. Their site does not work properly in Opera. Yet Opera users could easily account for 1,000 users every week. By not supporting Opera, and failing to follow a basic rule of web design, they could be just ignoring 52,000 (maybe more) people every year, that could be earning them extra revenue with banner clicks, affiliate purchases and content contributions.

[EDIT: The following appears to be fixed]

Security is another issue that concerns me - you may not be aware of it, but when you now log in, your username AND password are transmitted in a URL (page address) to dooyoo. This does not sound too bad, except that the password is unencrypted. You are probably safe, but if any malicious cracker-type is watching what you are doing online, they could find out your username and password. Some sites use JavaScript to find the last 10 pages you visited too, and store this information - and if that address happens to be in that list, your password becomes available once again.

[Note: It is not my intention to make people panic, but I suggest if you are one of those people who use the same password for everything, you change it as soon as possible so that if someone does get it, all they can do is access your dooyoo account].

[EDIT: The above appears to be fixed]

I have covered a few of the more serious bugs. Checking on a simple HTML validator has shown a plethora of simple coding bugs and glitches. Reading the site for a few minutes reveals countless more mistakes and problems, many of which are to do with the basic functionality of the site - things like the "Cash in My Miles" link, the latest opinions lists for each category (http://www.hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/latest.ht ml if you want to access them) and the "Suggest an Item" link have all disap
peared - all essential parts of the site. You can even get 'into' the old design by clicking on a fe
w select links.

[Note: I had to download and install a new browser so I could post this op - those of you who can't post, try Opera (the browser they are not supporting, yes)].

The only reason I can think, for any of this, is pressure. No web designer would have been able to put this site online as it was. Most of the professionals I have met would rather have quit than launch a site to a huge community of dedicated users that replaced what they were used to with something that was inferior to its predecessor. However, the investors in any company can carry some serious weight - and could easily have been the ones forcing a launch.

If they were responsible, then they are fools. They have annoyed the community that provides the site's content, by using them, without warning, as site testers. There has been little feedback (apart from that provided by Katie, who, as ever, has been an absolute diamond), and very little in the way of change. There is no page saying what has been identified, what is being fixed and when it will be fixed.

If dooyoo had no choice but to launch, then I suggest that they do several small things, to keep their community intact and remotely happy.

1. Suggestions - there is a backlog, and it's probably about time the managers helped out, so next week add all of them. Everyone in your office, bar the tech guys, should be adding these as soon as possible. It may help to keep the flow of content going, and will certainly keep the users happy to see something being done.

2. Up the payments per read for the next few weeks. Maybe a month. Again, keep your site testers happy and using the site - because if they stop, it will remain untested and incomplete, and a little more cash will serve as both a thankyou, an incentive to help, and to ensure that those people who post now
are not harmed by the lack of users - and so continue to post.

3. Set up a page listing the bugs already
found, to save your users reporting things already being fixed, and to save Katie having to mail people time and again about the same thing. Keep progress reports for each bug beside it - a big tick for when it is solved would help too - a red one. I like big red ticks on websites. Give people dates by which each bug will be fixed - and don't ever miss one of those deadlines. Give yourself an extra day for each bug, if you have to, but restoring confidence will be trickier if you constantly fail to do what you promise.


If they had a choice of date to launch, and how to launch, I wonder why they chose to do it so under-handedly and badly tested? They surely gain nothing, bar testing of a system they already know to be faulty. And you have to wonder why the UK site has been used as the guinea pig, when dooyoo.de, the German version, remains unchanged. You have to wonder why the German version of the site has had over 150 products added since the 29th of August, and the UK site has had just one - this category. You have to wonder what the future holds for dooyoo.co.uk, when the people in charge seem to care so little for what happens to it and it's dedicated community of contributors....

Summary: