I’ve just been watching a video published by the BBC about how price comparison sites are making navigation hard for visually impaired users. The problem is the tests were carried out on the wrong websites!

They say they are looking at Confused.com and yet the tester was actually looking at confuse.com with is nothing more than a spam site to catch people who typed the wrong url. Then they look at http://www.compare-and-go.co.uk thinking it is part of GoCompare.com when it’s just an affiliate site which makes money by sending traffic to GoCompare.com – the site even says “We are not part of GoCompare.com” on the homepage.

The BBC has helpfully added a message to say “The following website confuse.com has no connection with Confused.com” so why on earth are they posting a video of it? Basically they have found a useless spam site and come to the conclusion it isn’t easy for visually impaired people to use it.

If I was GoCompare or Confused.com I would be pretty upset about this.

Words fail me.

This is a guest post by Quova, geolocation experts. Click here for a 16 page whitepaper relating to the research they have carried out in this area.

Right now, there are more than 1.2 billion Internet users around the world, most of which speak a language other than English and most live outside of the United States. In a multilingual world, the odds are that Web users will get lost in the online space as it can be hard to control how people arrive at a Web site and ensure that, once they’ve arrived, they easily find where they need to go.

Read more >>

At Branded3 we use Postcode Anywhere for a huge amount of projects such as store finders and other applications where we need to lookup address data from postcodes or convert postcodes to coordinates.

This week Postcode Anywhere are launching an innovative new web service to help developers build applications – read below for details about the service.

Read more >>

This is the annoying page I get redirected to whenever I use my 1 week old version of Google Chrome to access Comcasts arrogant website.

Read more >>

This weekend we’ve been putting the finishing touches to the new BlogStorm design and it’s now live on the website (best viewed in Firefox while we iron out some bugs).

As well as looking a lot better than the previous design the new theme offers increased flexibility for new features. We chose to use the fantastic Thesis Theme because it has a great codebase that you can build from and customise to your hearts content. Wordpress as a CMS doesn’t offer users the ability to modify blog design very easily but Thesis fixes that and the latest version even lets you alter widths and colours from the control panel. Read more >>

As if Mr Brown didn’t have enough to deal with at the moment it appears that the shiny new website he paid £100,000 for might have been based on a free Wordpress theme. Read more >>

Yesterday I met a local startup company to discuss a new site they’ve launched called 1 Big Present which allows you to set up a gift list for a party, wedding or any other kind of event.

The idea is that rather than everybody turning up at the party with gifts you didn’t want you can direct them to your online gift list where they upload money that you can redeem for vouchers at places such as Amazon & John Lewis.

The site is one of the few brand new sites we see that has a real chance of becoming a mainstream website. It has all the boxes ticked – concept, design and even viral marketing elements.

If you’re having a party and 50 guests each pay £5 into your birthday fund that gives you a £250 voucher rather than 50 small gifts you didn’t really want. Apparently kids who have used the service for their parties have walked away with hundreds of pounds already.

O2 has got off to the worst possible start in the run up to iPhone 3G launch day. Every single news source in the world is reporting on the fact they have been unable to cope with demand during the pre-order process today.

Apparently this morning they sent a text message to everybody who had registered an interest. Thousands of customers then descended onto the site which promptly crashed.

Presumably O2 has lots of traffic and a robust e-commerce system in place already so how can they be unable to manage what is basically a database that stores peoples details?

The Register is less than sympathetic:

Customers were told by text message that new iPhones were available to existing customers who upgrade. But they were presented this morning with error messages on the O2 upgrade site after filling in forms and told to contact customer services by telephone.

“Which I did,” said Reg reader Carol Dew, “only to be advised that they couldn’t take telephone orders until Friday, and they were very sorry for the inconvenience, but they had 2000 other people just like me calling them this morning, and their managers had advised them that the site was overwhelmed. Because they didn’t anticipate the demand. But when I asked how many iPhones were in stock, since I was afraid they’d run out before I could order mine, I was told that they’d asked customers to ‘register their interest’ on the website (did that; hence getting the text this morning). And that every time someone registered their interest, they ordered in an iPhone for them. Yet they didn’t anticipate today’s demand.”

From The Telegraph:

An O2 spokeswoman said she did not know how many people had been able to pre-order before the upgrade website was suspended. She said they were working to restore the site as soon as possible and were “pretty confident” they would have enough handsets to cope with the demand.

Following on from the fantastic redesign of the BBC homepage the entire BBC News website has had a nice revamp this morning.

There doesn’t appear to be any new functionality but the design looks pretty good.