I just visited a site that allows you to find a certain type of business using your location and then ordering from them. I won't give any more details to avoid shaming the company but it made me realise just how many people underestimate the basics of getting a site off the ground. I think the basic flaw is assuming that web sites are easy so let's go!

The Basics

Of course, you should know that you will need to register a company and probably open a business bank account. If you are in a regulated profession, you might need to register. You should also consider insurance, especially if you are in a position to cause people problems.

Something this company missed is to have legal information displayed prominantly on your website. The UK Data Protection law requires that you tell your users how you process their data. Also, all official communication requires company information and since most people would consider your website an official communication, the details should be on there too!

User Experience

If you want to make a dent, you absolutely have to make people think "wow" when they hit your site. This particular site was slow to load (and didn't display until after all its resources loaded, which is very poor). The journey was ill thought-out and the design looked virtually non-existent.

After forcing myself through the poor way it looked up your location, just to see, it then had a really clunky interface for ordering food, again it looked like things had been thrown together rather than designed.

Then there were broken links. There were several in the footer that weren't wired up (good luck signing up drivers if you can't even click the link!) and even the "our story" link didn't work. Not a great story.

Feedback

I then thought, as I sometimes do, to give unsolicited feedback in the hope that they will care. I then found an email that wasn't a link but also its text was not copyable so I had to manually write the email into an email field - positively 1990s!

Websites are like icebergs - you only see the 10% that faces the public but if that part is itself so poorly thought-out, there is not much chance that the rest of it is any good.

How anyone has signed up to use it I don't know but please people, if you want to do something, do it well!