It’s been a very long while since I held a high opinion of well-known New Zealand bookstore, Whitcoulls, though when I was younger I would visit the Cashel Street branch in Christchurch before heading down the road to Scorpio Books for extended browsing and buying.
I was intrigued though today to discover via a Google AdSense ad on a friend’s site that Whitcoulls now have an online store. I guess since they’ve spent money on ads they consider it finished and open.
Having spent last week at Webstock amongst 500 people discussing and striving for excellence in creating websites I was quite shocked to see the Whitcoulls online store with its frames.
Frames? Am I caught up in a timewarp? Did we slide back into the 90s while I was sleeping last night?
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- Whitcoulls website with its frames.
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- Error message at Whitcoulls online store.
The first thing I did, of course, was to search for WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide, since I can never find it in any physical bookstores I visit in New Zealand. Yup, they have it, though given its 7 to 28 day shipping time I presume Whitcoulls don’t actually have it, but just order it when someone buys it.
I delved a bit deeper into the website, looking at the code. Someone had clearly allocated the web developers a huge number of table tags and a vast array of javascripts, but they were issued only a handful of alt attributes for images — most have none, at all, not even empty ones.
And also they must have been given a salt shaker with some error messages to sprinkle around.
My opinion of Whitcoulls has dropped even lower. I hadn’t realised till seeing their website that that could be possible.
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Poor old Whitcoulls; kicking ‘em when they’re down! All I can say about the physical stores is that they’ve improved to what they were a few years ago. The staff actually want to help, they know where stuff is, and there’s a different atmosphere. As for their online store, I’m not a website designer so I can’t comment on that side of things; all I can say is that the site works. Sometimes that’s all you need. That’s not to say it couldn’t be a lot better, but it does do its job.
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