So, after much pre-publicity, speculation and hype, we now have two new Internet portals in the New Zealand market. Last week both Xtra and Microsoft revealed their offerings. And, while I really doubt if anyone outside the relevant organisations cares that much, I thought I would have a quick look at both and pass on my initial impressions.
How did they fare? Poorly.
When I opened MSN the first thing I saw was a warning:
Additional plugins are required to display all media on this page. Install missing plugins now…
That is a great start: do I want to install something else onto my machine just to view your content? I don’t think so. As a consequence, a significant part of my screen was blank, so I can’t really give you an accurate assessment of the content that they are providing for their visitors — at least those that have the requisite plugins installed.
Both MSN and Yahoo!Xtra weigh in at a hefty page size: 364KB and 354KB, respectively. That means that for Kiwis accessing these pages using dialup, they are in for a wait of around 90 seconds for the pages to load. A minute and a half to load: make it my homepage? Sure, what else am I going to do with my time?
This is particularly ironic given Yahoo is partnering Telecom on this venture. As we have recently seen, New Zealander’s access to broadband is not a given.
Following my look at mobile access to government sites, I decided to put these portals to the same test. Surely the big corporates are far more aware of this stuff than the public sector and will be much better positioned to deliver content over the phone (especially when you consider how much Telecom have to gain)? In a word, no.
Neither had skip links, and both served up big irrelevant images. Yahoo! acknowledged this was a problem by including a message that told me:
Please upgrade to a more recent browser: Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 or Safari 1.2
My message back to them: Please upgrade to a more user-centric approach to web development.
I will, however, acknowledge that at least Yahoo! offers RSS feeds from their portal, which increases the utility of the site, sort of.
Conclusions
Looking at both sites really made me ask myself one question: why would you bother? If you want a portal, customise your Google homepage and build your own (you can even set it up to work on your phone).
These two offerings are for people who don’t understand the web, have incredibly low expectations about what sites should be delivering and have no physical or technological handicaps. Anyone else taken either for a spin and come up as disappointed?
