Probably the WORST web site in the world (blartly.co.uk)

Name: sandrabarber

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Product:	blartly.co.uk
Date:	17/10/01 (56 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You might win a crap prize

Disadvantages: Technically inept, Visually vacuous, Functionally unfit

Blartly.co.uk is a site offering ‘instant’ win prizes and a chance to amass points which you can spend at other online stores. Trouble is, there’s nothing remotely ‘instant’ about this site, and the points you amass are so miniscule as to be completely worthless. All in all, in fact, this is probably the worst web site in the world EVER.

What’s it all about?

Basically it’s a site advertising and selling goods (household, electrical, music, computer etc.), tempting visitors with the chance to amass these points and the opportunity to win prizes at the click of a mouse. Fine in concept, but…

Looks & Functionality

At first glance you think it’s okay, nothing special, just sort of green and white and inoffensive as you wait for the content to load.

Trouble is, the content doesn’t load! Or it does, but it loads down in the bottom right hand corner and you can’t see it unless you scroll about, even in 1024 x 768 resolution!

What you do see on screen is loads and loads of white space. Not arty-beautiful saatchi&saatchi type white space, but mere white space. Completely redundant, purposeless, vacuous white space!

And the time it takes this white space to load is incredible. You can literally wait for MINUTES for a page to load, only to find that there’s hardly anything there!!!

Each page (and each one is very long, despite there being next to nowt on it) appears to be a gif image. Even the most amateur web author knows that large gif images (unsliced by the look of it, may I add!) are absolute death to a web site.

Getting around the site is a nightmare too. First you have to scroll around the white space until you come to the links you want, and then you click on them, wait for literally minutes, and then they appear in all their nothingness and start directing you somewhere else before you eventually find what yo
u were looking for. (And that’s if you’re lucky. There are so many blind alleys and cul-de-sacs on this site that you often find yourself having to type the site’s address into your browser to get back to the home page).

And what do you get when you get there?

When you’ve found your category and eventually wound up there, what you get are loads of very nice products for sale, and some shitty little tacky products you can click on and perhaps ‘instantly’ win (which is very misleading because their home page leads you to believe it’s the good things you could be winning).

Now having spent half an hour on this site and figuring that the least they could give me for my trouble was a shitty little tacky prize, I entered several. After each one I waited for literally minutes for a window to open and tell me I hadn’t won.

However, I had amassed points for entering for the prizes. Trouble was, you needed about 50,000 points to be worth even a fiver, and you got very few for your trouble (sorry, can’t remember exactly how many).

So, why use this site?

Absolutely no reason whatsoever in my opinion. It is a very unpleasant and time consuming experience. The prizes aren’t worth winning and if you wanted to shop you’d be better off visiting all your fave shopping sites yourself rather than running up a massive phone bill waiting for blartly to take you to them.

I think many must agree with me, because I remember when blartly started they said that once they’d got x amount of members they’d be giving away a Suzuki 4 x 4 and they’re still running that promotion. As they launched yonks ago now, running the promotion is tantamount to having a big banner on their site saying STAY AWAY – WE ARE CRAP AND UNPOPULAR.

Now I don’t question blartly’s ethics – I have read ops from people who have won their
shitty little tacky prizes – I just question their artistic, technical, marketing, customer focus, business and design ability.

I thought the idea of the internet was that it was supposed to be visualy appealing, fast and FUN?

Life’s to short and the net’s too wide to waste your time on these amateurs. As far as I’m concerned they can take their shitty little tacky prizes and shove em where the sun don’t shine (and the sun certainly don’t shine on blartly’s pages!)

Summary: