The Site goes to the lowest bidder..

What is it about the web that makes our biggest companies think they can cut corners and put out garbage websites. I'm still reeling at the sheer crappness of National Coaches latest poor excuse. I've never seen anyone use expensive shockwave to imitate a Java scroll before. That really is a first.

I'm never really that bothered about rubbish adverts on the telly cos I never pay the slightest attention to them anyway.

But the web is an area where corporate Britain is genuinely walking about with its kecks round its ankles. And they've no bloody excuse because they are paying teams of professionals good money to make them look this bad. Someone is responsible for this spectacular business own goal and no-one seems the least bit bothered.

A website quite simply is the big first impression. Everyone from customers to journalists to a company's own loyal workforce makes serious judgments about the state of the company through that website. How it's run, how it thinks, where its going, how well its products are made, what kind of service you can expect.

Yet I browse into a website that's representing a major British business where it's clear the site cost less than the MD's desk - let alone the fat Lexus he zips up and down the motorway in. Less than the receptionist's Christmas bonus by the look of some of 'em.. What kind of business thinkers will spend more on a first class air ticket than they did on the most important corporate showcase they have.

Our captains of industry are a joke if they think that they are doing themselves justice with their piss-poor two-grand cobwebsite. A crap website shows the entire world just how low they are prepared to stoop to conspicuously save money.

Yesterday the National Coaches cheap nastiness genuinely offended me. I know I've only got fifteen quid to catch a coach up to Scotland but I shouldn't have to deal with the kind of website that the jerk next door could have done. I'm supposed to put my hard earned credit card number into THAT?

You can see the suits sat around insisting that the site looked like a student did it in the IT class - even the logo seems to have been hand cut by some seven year old. This is Oxfam Shop web design - a genuine case of a millionaire driving a Lada because he thinks it's cool - covering up the fact that it just looks cheap and nasty. What does this website say about the state of their buses...

Harry Ramsden's once was a great online nostalgia fest - with groovy old photos of their oldest shops. Now, well take a look at this Halloween experience. Trick or treat. A livid green combination of 1990s Microsoft Frontpage Template styling with genuinely retro rollovers rescued from Archive.org. It looks like one of the basket cases from 'Websites That Suck', featuring just about every horror movie web design move in the book. The biggest insult is that somebody got paid for this instead of arrested by the style police. What does this website say about the state of the food...

I don't mind that the web's community spirit got wrecked by the corpo "brand site" clogging up the search engines so you just can't find a genuine home page when you need one. What I do mind is that for all their so-called business acumen and high salaried creative thinking they are making a right royal mess of things online. Cheap, nasty, kid-next-door brochure sites litter the British Internet and we have the misfortune now and again to stumble into these godforsaken web spaces like a bad dream. What does this say about the state of the nation.

You'd think our great leaders would find this poor show a matter of great concern. But it's clear that our elected representatives are still in the electronic dark age and have no clue as to how bad British business looks online because none of them are online themselves.

Less than a third of MPs are webbed up. And those that are have websites that are badly put together, out of date, half baked or stillborn - the political equivalent of having a rusting truck propped up on housebreaks in the front lawn.

Some MPs are switched on - just look at Ann Widdecombe, the former Doris Karloff, who has reinvented herself as a dizzy blonde online. And I have to say good on her, because she's clearly having fun with the website and still getting her point across. Widdy Web is one of those rare political sites that seems to be run by a human being. That's not to say I'd like to run into her up an alley in a dark night or anything, mind, but the blonde is definitely an improvement.

Mandy Web is an even rarer sight - run an MP who understands that a website is a way to archive, to present ideas, to communicate, and to do that thing that MPs are elected to do. Represent and report. To me any MP (or any business come to that) who isn't working hard every day to make their web presence better just isn't doing their job. If an MP can't even use basic communication tools what on earth are they doing with themselves.

As for senior managers who will happily spend a hundred thousand on a tabloid TV ad, but will let the website be designed by the village idiot for the price of a tube of Smarties, words fail me. As do their webpages. I'm off to find your nearest competitors and hopefully I'll never have to pollute my browser with your sorry little website ever again.

Blogga.