Looks nice, but does it work?

Websites have been around for ages now, advertising, selling, making money, etc. so you would think that most of the surviving ones would work. Evidently, you would be wrong.

In the past few days I have been repeatedly disappointed by websites that are supposed to allow you to send image files to photo developers to have your photos printed out.

It seems like a simple idea - I have an image file, they have the ink, paper and a machine that reads the file, and they print out a picture for me. Then I pick it up at their store. But I have run into so many problems using this simple idea.

The first site I went to is for a pharmacy that does photo printing. I located a convenient store on the map on their website and prepared to print. I downloaded their version of some software that looked safe that the website needed to make the pictures look pretty online. Only after I had spent time uploading the files and preparing to pick the location I wanted them printed to did I find out that they only print to one shop in the city, and it's not the one I wanted to pick up the pictures at!

The next site I tried was a camera store that prints photos. I located one of their stores that was convenient, and checked that I could send files to be printed there. After downloading an update for Flash, uploading my files, and going through a pretty - but rather silly - interface that made you go through each picture as if you were holing prints in your hands to make sure they were all successfully uploaded, I went to the payment page, put in my credit card, hit enter and... the page blanked out the fields. It didn't let me complete the order.

OK, so I was on a PC (I usually use a Mac) using Google Chrome, a wonderfully lightweight and fast browser which may cause problems for some badly designed websites when their developers have use browser-specific code. So I tried again with Firefox, not my favourite, but most websites support it... many minutes later I had the same problem. So I held my nose and tried it again in Internet Exploder... and had the same problem. So it's the website that is the problem. It has pretty Flash graphics to play with your pictures... but it doesn't work! I can't use it to print my photos. And I'm not a novice who can't use a computer. As an e-commerce site it is a disappointing and annoying failure.

So I went with a site I know and have used before. No special software, no cutesy playing with virtual photos in a hand, just a list of files, thumbnails that can be clicked on to check the larger versions, and it prints at a drugstore about 3 blocks from me. Unfortunately, I wanted to print out the pictures in another city and have someone there pick them up, saving me the effort of mailing them, but that is just not going to happen.

Advice for e-commerce websites: kill the cutesy graphics, and spend your money developing a website that actually lets a customer acquire what they want, where they want it, and pay you money for it. Or it will be a case of:

Nice graphics... shame about the profits.