Websites that crash

A reminder at how bad it is for the user

[ukgimp]

[theregister.co.uk...]

Is this sort of thing down to poor design or just a lame hosting package?

What can be done to make sure this does not happen on your site and do you tack such things.

Cheers

[vibgyor79]

9 out of 10 transactions don't go through? That's kinda hard to believe.

[PCInk]

It doesn't say 9 out of 10 transactions - it's 9 out of ten people. I have had sites crash on me when ordering (little sites sometimes - like the Royal Mail), so I am in the 9. Are you in the 1 that has never had a problem? Lucky if you are!

[ukgimp]

I tried to buy a train ticket for pubcon and Virgin kept throwing an fit. After four times trying to get in I rang tehn up and had to use voice activated syetem which was equally as bad. If there was another option I would have taken it.

Some ecommerce set ups suck, thats a fact. Based on the principle that I have a fair idea what I am doing, how in the name of god do people like my mother cope?

[victor]

I tried to spend USD300 online for a new widget a couple of days ago. Failed completely. I hit sites that:

404ed on important pages

Were Flash only (one I tried to look at in a Flash-enabled browser. It chugged for five minutes and asked if I wanted an invalid certificate)

Had numerous Javascript errors -- I'll swat away the odd warning, but three in a row and I'm out. One site's menus would not work after the Javascript error

Failed to download any images -- I suppose the site was usable, but it didn't look it

Were IE only ("Best viwed with" means "Go away: we don't like your sort here" to me)

Had broken search functions -- "widget" returned every page -- they've got "widget" in every title; "red widget" failed to find any page at all -- even though Google had found the inner page

Broken framesets -- so Google took me to an inner page with no navigations.

Timed out with an "IIS cgi limit exceeded message"

To answer your question ukgimp:

Test it in debuggers to remove all Javascript errors -- otherwise it may only work in a browser that makes specific error-recovery assumptions.

Run on a server than isn't overloaded (the IIS error above)

Check all links (use XENU or equivalent)

Get friends to try out transactions -- tells you how real-world paths through the code work.

Test everything everytime on an offline server before you upload new versions of anything -- otherwise you are batting away customers while trying to fix bugs

Etc -- but basically test and test and test.