ISP redesign unites the web in nausea Internet service provider Be There has redesigned its home page in a way guaranteed to get it talked about. The site is absolutely hideous. But worse, several Reg readers were presented with other people's account details when they first logged in. Customers could see other customers' addresses and phone numbers but payment …
Also, the colour 'scheme' brings back memories of old games using CGA graphics, bluerghhh... that was headache inducing enough (added to the dodgy CRT monitors that had your local opticians rubbing their hands with glee).
Also a quick search on Brand Republic (http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/922278/Broadband-kicks-off-integrated-review/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH) shows that they're after a new design agency to handle their integrated account (which may include the site, I'm not sure) and as quoted "The company has selected three agencies to pitch for the business. The incumbent, My Agency, was not invited to defend the account.". Coincidence, shurely not?
I get:
www.bethere.co.uk uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.
(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
And Firefox does not display the site. Oh well, I would only have been a gawker anyway.
I too followed their email link and thought I must have ingested some funny mushrooms in the quiche I'd just eaten.
Is it a clever joke? I thought. Has it been hacked? But no, this was meant to be genuine. What a genius must have came up with this!
Anyhow, not only did it look grotesque it didn't even work (you waited 15 minutes when you clicked on a link to be taken there -- if it felt like it).
You couldn't have made it up. I'm off to see if they have done anything more acceptable and if they haven't I'm canceling my account.
Okay, so the old, pink monstrosity was, well, a monstrosity... but this is a leap backwards, not forwards.
The email they sent me announcing this 'makeover' says:
"Since then we have seen the dawn of Web 2.0 and Social Media, and to be frank we haven't done much about it. In particular the one area that hasn't changed much has been our website, so we've taken the liberty to make it much better."
Aside from the fact I can change my own background (whoop!) I really don't see '2.0' in this... in fact, it's barely 1.0 and reminds me of something that might have squeezed down through my 14.4 modem in days gone by.
Perhaps the new member centre will be where the goodies are hiding... but who knows, it's still down whilst they figure out what they did to the security.
Oh, and if you think this new design is 'quite nice' perhaps you should try setting the background to the 'jirobevis' option. Sweet cheeses!!!!!!
The design isn't what I'd choose, but it's not so bad really. I can see the effect they're aiming for, and it pretty much works. I can understand why some people would dislike it, but the universal hatred seems odd.
The SSL certs, account mix-ups and failure to validate are unforgivable of course, and should be fixed ASAP. But as for not rendering in IE6 - good on you! Point me to the dev who made that decision and I'll buy him/her a pint.
That is just nasty, aliased text, bad layout and the large FF warning saying the site cannot be trusted.
It's not a bold design choice it's a lack of design choice, yikes they need to join us all in the 21st century not go back to the mid nineties.
They just put me off leaving Virgin and joining BE Well done guys.
Who commisioned this ? Off with their heads !
It was Dave (www.dave.biz) what done it. One of their employees turned up on the Be* forums and promptly got the flaming of his life.
I have never seen anything quite like it; the posts on the Be* forums are 100% negative; it is open revolt down there.
An attempt to invoke the fuzzy feeling of the "good old days" when all this was still wild and novel. When UK WiReD mag was not quite as shit as it seems now. To tap into that nostalgic goodwill.
The actual effect, however, is "Ow! Holy fuck, my eyes! I'm blind!"
#00FFFF, especially that much of it, should be against the Geneva Convention.
Hi
I work for My Agency and just wanted to clarify that the new Be site is nothing to do with us. We are continuing to work with O2 on www.o2litmus.co.uk but not Be Broadband. We wish them well with future endeavours.
James Easterbrook
Client Services Director
My Agency
Wow. Just needs some animated GIFs of something in 3D, a frameset and 120k picture of some middle-aged couple on a beach and we're right back to the days of IE4. They might as well have hosted it on one of those crappy old free hosting sites you used to get, just to really get in the vogue of the time.
Plus I had to temporarily add an exception for their SSL cert - now that's just added class!
The 90s called. They want their website back.
Seriously though, it looks hideous. I've heard Be are a good ISP but I wouldn't touch them with a fifty foot bargepole with that website. Could you honestly recommend a friend to join them when you know they're going to be confronted by that monstrosity?
"Ok I'm going to say it: The new web site is quite nice. A brave choice and not to every bodies taste but I like it"
I think it looks quite nice, however:
1. It displayed other people's details
2. It's a NEW site, they specifically say they DON'T support ie6... and it's not valid html. No excuse
btw for me the certificate worked when I checked...
(if you _really_ want to see it looking hideous, change backgrounds from the drop-down box...)
. . . the site requires the ire it's receiving.
Yes, the colours could be toned down, but the actual site layout is reasonably clean and tidy and everything is readable.
In comparison to many of the abortions that are around (so many trying desperately to look like StalkerBook it's getting silly), it's not that bad.
I tried the once and Firefox (3.5.12) critted out with an unexplained failure.
My colleague had tried to log in and was presented by nothing but back end errors.
When I first saw it I thought the look was just because they had got the content working first and would dress it up later but given that it blatently doesn't work either...
If anyone out there is a software tester who needs work due to the recession thingy BE is a company badly in need of some.
...a few sparkly LOL animated gifs and maybe a rotating e-mail/@ image in garish colours, oh and a dancing baby too, every page like this needs a dancing baby.
Absolutely god awful site, can't think what was wrong with their old one and why they needed to change to this one...
Rob
The front page has all the information I want to see from an ISP, basically the price per month. A few useful links for potential and current customers.
I logged in to the members area and got my own details back. The forums and member areas have always been shocking pink.
Who ever goes to their ISP's "home" page anyway? I go on the net to find other stuff.
Compare it with Tiscali for example, there are no animated news feeds, no links for fashion advice or holidays, no high bandwidth images of words... I don't want any of that and I REALLY hate jpgs with text in. Totally unneccessary.
In short, I like it.
They could have employed this guy to design the web site:
http://www.myspace.com/21899956
If you're lost for words, the phrase you're looking for is either "AIEEEE!" or "my eyes!".
Also, did you see the old website? I think I prefer this to all the shiny gradient pink, lack of validation, borked certs and data leaks aside..
I don't think I've seen so much magenta since porn sites abandoned it in the late 90s.
The site mightn't support IE 6 but I suspect it works with Netscape 2.
Looks like the SSL thing is a haven't put the certificates on all the cluster issue. Professional, I didn't know you could cluster C64s!
My first thought was 'this has to be a joke...', closely followed by 'hey, isn't that the site I designed back in primary school all those years ago?' and finally 'oh dear god...I recommended this company to my mother...I hope she doesn't see this monstrosity!'
It's hideous, childish and honestly...I could have done better for half what they probably paid! But then, so could my five year old niece. Visuals aside though...the fact that there are so many problems with it is inexcusable...incorrect user details displayed? Wrong details for SSL certificate? Not compatible with all browsers? Had my first website had these issues, I'd have received a resounding 'F' for my efforts. That's what the TESTING section of web design is about!
Get it sorted, Be, otherwise I'm going to start looking into a career in web design.
I think I may still have a copy of the home page sitting in a FF tab on the machine at home.
I'll save a copy of the page for posterity when I get home.
I have to say, I got the infamous re-relanch email yesterday and swiftly after experienced a full blown W.T.F??? moment when I pulled up site and genuinely thought I'd gone to the wrong site...
I can't help wondering if they outsourced the site re-design job to the idiots responsible for the London 2012 logo abomination.
They're my ISP and now I'm ashamed and won't recommend them to anyone lest I be judged by their appearance. I wear Armani and Gucci for Christ's sake -- what are my friends going to think if they see that monstrosity?
;-)
I'd like to know who the consultancy was who designed this: so that I can ensure that I never work with them. I've worked with some shocking web-designers in the past, but none of them were quite this bad (except, maybe, for a bunch of compete tw*ts from Fashion Street, E1, who I won't name).
LB
The old website was very swish – money had been spent. Be are now claiming the new one was a very bad design choice, rather than the result of penny pinching. Therefore, I don’t get the use of a ‘cheap’ SSL certificate that requires Firefox users to manually download the CA cert.
https://support.comodo.com/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=91
Surely the point is to make people not want to touch Be with a barge pole because of leaking customer data, broken SSL and a website that lacks affiliation with the "Arthur Dailey Group of Companies", and have everyone go to O2 instead before eventually getting rid of be all together?
Why does this company waste money offering the same connection under two brands anyway?
My god, I really hate Dave.biz.
This presentation on their website really makes me want to break something. Preferably something called Dave.
http://www.slideshare.net/thekingmob/not-another-social-media-pres-the-internet-branding
sample text:
THIS IS BEYOND THE INTERNET
BEING TRANSPARENT IS A GIVEN, AND IF WE FUCK IT UP... BRANDS HAVE TO BE CRAZY TRANSPARENT
LET THE BRAND GOLDRUSH START
OPEN SOURCE BRANDING OFFERS GAPS FOR PEOPLE TO PLAY IN
*facepalm*
Also, the above presentation contains some rather basic spelling and grammar errors, which hardly seem to add to the professional image.
Maybe these things don't really matter in 2.0 land. Did the idiots win already, perhaps while I was sleeping? they certainly seem to be keeping in work.
Top marks for at least keeping it readable and uncluttered, I'll admit. I'd rather have ugly and functional versus pretty but unusable. But then I *am* a child of the 8-bit era.
Still, it doesn't really convey an image that says "we are professional". Looks more like "we're tightwads and so we got the neighbour's teenaged son who knows about computers to do it for a fiver".
It's not hard to keep a clean layout like this but make it look even just a wee bit better, you know.
did they get someone colourblind to test it? Pink is a bad colour to use.
As for the layout - It looks like a sketch on the back of a napkin in whatever restaurant the designers lunched the MD under the table. The colour scheme looks like it too - I'm guessing they used a couple of the free crayons they give you for the kids. But frankly my kids could have made a more professional design on the inside of a burger box using nothing but ketchup and donut cream, so the restaurant should ask for the crayons back.
Words fail me as to the holocaust that is the Be homepage.
I was in the group that was consulted about the change and I, along with a couple of others vehemently opposed those design changes back then and still do today. Yet here we are, despite the misgivings and counter-arguments, we were ignored by all the so-called web designeers and advocates in the group who were basically yes men and women.
Hang your head in shame Be.
Reminds me of the good old days, programming a BBC micro in Mode 2 Graphics, where you had a massive 7 colours, Magenta and Cyan being the two of them that have been most noticeably sprayed over that monstrosity.
I'm only slightly disappointed they didn't use the Magenta/Cyan flicker/strobe colour that the BBC had. Then they'd have made it truly barf inducing.
Oh yes, they used the old 'expose your confidential customer data to random people and leave them open to fraud or abuse without saying sorry and focusing purely on the aesthetics of it as a damage limitation method' trick to endear themselves to the punters...
If this story was about Barclay's Bank botching their website so that customers could see each others details when they logged in and were unable to see their own account, no one would be suggesting it was clever mind games from the 'brilliant' marketing people, other than conspiracy theorists and company spin doctors.
Isn't a redesign supposed to be better than what went before?
I'm not a fan of pink (the colour, the singer is a different story altogether) but I did like the old site a lot better then the new one.
The colours are wrong, Courier New is wrong, the custom backgrounds are crimes against humanity.
I suppose I'm guessing they had a look at last.fm's site with its very own overdose of pink (the colour, you won't find the singer on her Artist Radio, but then when is an artist on their own Artist Radio at last.fm) and decided to be different.
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