Paul Catmur: A lesson from the shambolic Vector website

Falling trees shouldn't crash your website, writes Paul Catmur.

OPINION:

As I write this I have had no power since last weekend's storms. Fortunately, my pessimism paid off and although I have no hot water or cooker, I have a generator for the essentials like Wi-Fi and iPhone chargers. Things might have got a bit smelly, but at least I had Wordle. Yes, I realise that if you live in a war zone or the 15th century that power would be considered an incredible luxury, but we don't, it's a real pain when it goes, and Vector was found sadly lacking.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate those poor folk working around the clock, shinning up ladders and waving pliers around trying to get us powered up. And I understand that I live in a beautiful country sprinkled with magnificent, but occasionally skittish, trees that when the mood takes them will hurl themselves at the nearest power line. What I take issue with is the state of Vector's website. I won't bore you with the details (well, maybe a little) but suffice to say that through a number of online requests, promises and crashes it took four days before I heard anything at all, and that was to tell me that the power was already working. Only, of course it wasn't.

What are websites for?

As Vector knows from experience, nobody is really interested in going to their website unless there are power cuts. So why, when there are power cuts, and everybody naturally goes to the website to find out what is going on, does it crash? And why was their outage app so bad that they withdrew it in 2018 and still haven't replaced it? You'd think that taking better care of their customers, who are also their shareholders, would make economic sense.

Most companies have a website, they're bloody useful things, and if you're thinking of getting a new one the important thing is to spend some time working out exactly what is required before calling in the tech wizards. It's like building a house, make sure you've worked out where the doors go before you call in the builders.

Too important to be left to a website developer

Several years ago I was involved with a food manufacturer, somewhere in the sausage area. Among other things, they wanted a new website. I sat down with our internal website guru to discuss. He was fizzing. He told me that he already had it sorted, that rather than a "boring" website they would create a meeting hub for all people involved in cooking, from students, to housewives, to Dancing with the Chefs contestants. It would be a place where they could come daily to discuss recipes, cooking tips, debate frying temperatures etc. It would be a compendium of knowledge and shared resources.

As politely as I could, which as many people know is not particularly polite, I tried to express my reservations. It would not only cost a bunch to build but would subsequently involve considerable resources to update the recipes, moderate the conversations and keep the neo-Nazis and Bitcoin salesmen off the chat room.

Only, of course, it wouldn't really need that much moderation, as only the seriously deranged would spend any time loitering on the website of a processed meat company. It would take months to build, cost a fortune, and float aimlessly around the internet like a piece of digital space junk. The recipes would never be updated. Nobody would debate anything. Eventually, it would fade away.

The client agreed with me and sacked us all.

Keep it fit for purpose

During my time in advertising, as well as working on other people's websites, we also built our own. We started by looking at who the prospective visitors might be and what they were looking to find out. We narrowed this down to prospective clients, prospective employees and pizza delivery drivers. Consequently, we arrived at the following contents:

• Who we were.
• What we did.
• Where we did it.
• A picture of my dog.

That was it. No blogs. No "News" pages that were 18 months out of date. No digital wizardry to slow things down when all people were after was the address to type into the Uber app.

So Vector, please do your customers a favour. When you're rebuilding your website, in particular the Outage Centre, look at it from the customer's point of view. Think about how it's used, when it's most used, and how that experience can be most painless. Websites don't have to be brilliant, but they need to be fit for purpose.

I do hope you get it together before the next time.

Because the only thing we know for sure is that there will be a next time.