Overall on-line Christmas sales this year are expected to rise by 28.8% (£2.6bn) to £11.5bn - equivalent to 17p for every pound spent during the festive period, and reinforcing the importance of the on-line sector in driving retail growth.
That's a huge opportunity for on-line retailers to make significant sales and make a real impact on the bottom line.  However, it's also an opportunity to screw things up.
With the pressure to sort out Christmas presents and find the best deals on-line shoppers are likely to be even less tolerant of poor quality and poor performance. 

Anything that reduces the on-line experience and adds any level of frustration to the already pressured situation will have people leaving sites in droves.

Now's the time for on-line retailers to make sure that the on-line experience of every visitor to their sites is as good as it possibly can be.

An inconvenient truth

When things go wrong they always go wrong at the worst possible time.  A rather glum view but somehow it always works out to be true - often when things are done in a rush or at busy times.  And it's certainly true for people responsible for controlling their organisations websites.
 
A prime example, even though not a retail site, was a link on the Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport (www.culture.gov.uk) with a title of process of a General Election (which links to a page on the www.parliament.uk website) which failed around lunchtime on Friday 7th May - yes that's right, just around the time when everyone would have been looking for any info they could find about elections and hung Parliaments.

There's a couple of things that are a little alarming about this.
 
Firstly, from a culture.gov.uk view point, this link wasn't buried in the depths of their website - it was right there on the front page.  Now most sites use some sort of monitoring service to measure availability and performance of their sites and it would be strange if they didn't use their Home page for this like most organisations do.  To mitigate this a little, the problem with many of these services is that they only measure availability and performance and they don't check the quality of the page the site serves up. So you can end up serving up rubbish with 100% availability with superb performance when what is actually needed is something a little more sophisticated which checks that the page is OK as well.

Secondly, looking at this from the www.parliament.uk site, I'd say that a page covering how elections are run would be a pretty key page on their site.  And if someone decided to move or rename such a page then you'd expect them to put what's called a "redirect" in place so that if anyone has a link to the original page any clicks on those links will automatically be redirected to the new page.  This is normal practice and happens all the time.  And indeed that's exactly what they did four and a half hours after making the change to solve the problem.

The people at culture.gov.uk were probably blissfully unaware that the problem even existed because they didn't solve the problem - the people at www.parliament.uk solved it.

The truth is that at end of the day, or in this case late afternoon, neither set of organisations come out well in this.
 
And, of course, the problem occurred at one of the most inconvenient of times possible.

Even when you're busy you still need to test your web pages work OK

Updating existing or creating new web pages to promote the latest offers as you come up to a busy selling period is common place on retail websites.  The problem is that these things are often done in a rush to tight time scales and compromises have to be made.  It's often testing those pages that gets squeezed.

So combine things being done in a rush with not being thorough and problems inevitably occur.

And Code Quality (i.e. is the HTML on a page Standards compliant) is not as high up the priority list as it perhaps should be. It's not always obvious just what the implications can be if you don't keep on top of these errors.  But in essence Standards compliant HTML should help ensure that web browser display your pages in a consistent way regardless of which one your visitors use.

The standard for HTML tells a browser how to handle the code but there is no standard for what the browsers should do when they come across non-standard code. Should they ignore it or assume you meant something else ?

So different browsers do different things under these circumstances  so Webpages may not look the same in the different browsers - and there's a proliferation of browsers out there especially with the increase in browsers on mobile devices. With all these browsers out there it's becoming more and more difficult to ensure that your Webpages work across all browsers.

A key way to help with this is to ensure that all of your code is compliant with the Standards.

I came across an example recently of a Webpage that was completely jumbled by IE8 (including when I tried viewing the page in "compatibility mode") yet when I viewed it in Firefox it was fine. It was a real simple coding error where they'd try to put a couple of words in the Meta Description in double quotes.  This made all of the words after the first double quote (double quote is the delimiter for the Description) to be treated as Attributes (sorry for the techno blurb), which meant they were all errors.

Here's what it looks like:

Clearly something that would have been spotted if the editor had viewed it in IE.

But even when it not a busy time (someone assured me that "not a busy time" does exist !) testing each web page in all the different browsers would be a Herculean task.  The easier way is to make sure your HTML is Standards compliant.