bobpeers -> blog

There’s always a few things that bother me regarding IT in my workplace but I thought I’d mention a few of the worst offenders concerning the Internet/Intranet site. I suspect a few of these are common to many sites out there :-)

The Internet Site

1. The company web site does not have any sort of custom ‘page not found’ (404 error), instead it just throws up the normal IIS error page. Very user unfriendly, unprofessional and a great way to loose visitors.
2. Unbelievably the site is only accessible through http://www.mycompany.com. If you go to http://mycompany.com without the www you get this page:
   
3. No favicon so the company logo is not visible in the location bar or in the bookmarks if you bookmark the page

The Intranet Site

1. Again, no custom ‘page not found’.
2. The web server runs IIS 4.0!!!
3. It’s coded using frames making it very difficult to bookmark a page which surely is one of the points of a source of in formation like the Intranet.!
4. Badly coded. Search the phone book for an entry and put an apostrophe in the name (for example O’Hara) and you get the errror [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Syntax error (missing operator) in query expression ‘InStr(name,’o'hara’)>0 ORDER BY name’.

   Firstly the input should be checked and properly escaped, secondly wouldn’t this be much easier using an SQL LIKE statement instead of using the VBScript function InStr and finally I shouldn’t see the standard VBScript error as it should have been handled.
5. It’s packed full of Excel, pdf, Word ,you name it files that could easily have been written in standard HTML. It seems that probably due to lack of time or knowledge people just drop a Word file in and create a link to it. This makes for a very annoying browsing experience.
6. Finally there’s no standard corporate identity across the site. Pages are written by different departments with no guidelines on how to develop a page resulting in a stylistic mess of pages.