People come to me for certain types of webwork, mostly based on the type of templating I’ve done in the past– WordPress, ModX, Joomla, Movable Type, Cubecart, Zencart, TextPattern . . . maybe a few others. But I also build an occasional site for myself. And I’ve got an idea for a site I want to build that is going to require, at some point, an affiliate program.

Now, because of what I do, I have all sorts of webtools loaded into my browser of choice, Firefox. One of them is the HTML Validator, which will tell me instantly if the page I’m on is properly coded, and while I’m working and previewing pages I just uploaded I’m reassured by that little green checkbox that lets me know I did my job right.

So today, I’m looking at affiliate program software offerings that I found on hotscripts and that are highly rated. The first one I check out is Affiliate Pro. And, being me, and having that little nifty tool down in the bottom right hand corner of my browser, I see that BIG RED X in the bottom of my browser window and I just have to click on it to see what this software author screwed up in their web coding . . . ooh dear. 69 errors. Do I really want to trust affiliate software that was written by a coder who was too sloppy to even clean up his or her homepage? How well coded is the affiliate program? is it as sloppy as the html?

Well, that wasn’t pleasant. So I checked out the next one, OSI Affiliate. Lo and behold, I see that BIG RED X in the bottom of my browser window and I just have to click on it to see what this software author screwed up in their web coding . . . wowza. 103 errors. And I thought the last coder was lazy and sloppy!

Um, this is not fun. How the hell do I find a quality affiliate application if none of the coders are even astute enough to realize that the html, which is a pretty simple coding language, should have correct syntax like any other coding language? That’s if they even bother with coding their language of choice properly, which I’m beginning to doubt is the case.

Okay, let’s try ONE MORE, Post Affiliate Pro. Why am I not surprised that I see that BIG RED X in the bottom of my browser window and, of course, I just have to click on it to see what this software author screwed up in their web coding . . . BING BING BING BING! This is the GRANDADDY OF ALL SCREWUPS! It is totally MIND BOGGLING that a page with 1,343 coding errors AND 6 warnings even shows up in my browser!

Now, I ask you, do I want to trust software, that does tracking of MY MONEY being paid out, to people who write such sloppy code? *** sigh ***

Technorati Tags: software evaluation, affiliate software, webdev

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Web Design, Web Standards, the Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.