Review of Movies @ Dundrum website

— Published November 21st, 2005  |  by David Moore   |  20 Comments

Early last year, we reviewed the Avonmore Milk site and suggested it wasn’t very good (the site is still there if you want to make your own mind up).

Recently one our of readers suggested there was a new challenger for the title of worst commercial site in Ireland – Movies @ Dundrum (www.moviesatdundrum.ie).

This is the site for the cinema in the impossibly large and largely swanky Dundrum Town Centre (a mall by any other name), and one could expect it to be appropriately swish. Or at least useful.

Instead it looks like a primary school project from 1998: clumsy logos, animated gifs, frames, a myriad of typefaces, navigation buttons in full caps with bevelled edges to them . . . it’s hard to know where to start.

To be fair, the site does tell you what films are on when. But it doesn’t offer any information about the films, and is so proud of the ‘Showing Now’ content, it repeats it exactly in the ‘Coming Soon’ section.

This is to distinguish ‘Coming Soon’ from the ‘Oncoming Films’ listed on the homepage. ‘Oncoming’? Isn’t that how you describe vehicles involved in a car crash?

On the ‘Cinema Info’ page, we’re given the simple description ‘Redefining Cinema’ (in large red Courier type). The site’s certainly redefining what I think of this particular cinema. There’s nothing on how many screens there might be, or the refreshments on offer, or access for people with disabilities.

Of course, accessibility (physical or online) is clearly not a concern here. The site’s source is a ugly agglomeration of code, with no DOCTYPE declaration, clunky tabling and other basic errors that offer very few concessions to users with disabilities. Unsurprisingly, the HTML doesn’t validate.

It’s perhaps a blessing that the online booking feature isn’t working yet – I’m not sure I’d trust this site with my credit card details.

Overall Movies @ Dundrum shows the massive damage a shoddy website can do to your reputation as an organisation. However professionally-run and welcoming the cinema is in real life, its online presence makes you think they’re an amateurish place with no real concern for what visitors want.

The best than can be said perhaps is that someone in management is taking a laudable interest in their child’s schoolwork, to the point of allowing them to build this site. When the kid reaches high school, things will definitely improve.

Know of somewhere even worse?