I like the confused.com tv adverts, and was impressed with the web savvy marketing - “I’m Confused.com” - pretty cool. I’m also in the middle of an accessibility review for all our client sites. They never ask for this, but we always try to make websites to basic best practice standards, and try to get clients to keep them that way.

I don’t need car insurance, a secured loan or a remortgage, but I do visit sites when the advert ‘works’. I expected to be impressed as the offline marketing seemed very web centric and probably does a brilliant job in terms of branding and driving traffic to the site.

So I did a search for www.confused.com in Google and as expected, landed on the home page.

Jeez. Every link opens up in a new browser window - how annoying is that?

• Smashing Magazine Views
• Sitepoint Views
• The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999

Nobody likes this - why do it?

Jakob Nielsen has likened the practice of opening links in a new window to a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet.

OK - the slightest screw up in the code screws the accessibility rating of your site. Ah - I noticed the accessibility statement. Even this opened in a new window. Actually a few minutes on the confused.com site opened up god knows how many new windows.

If you have any difficulties using our website with certain web browsers or other software, we want to improve on that. Our web team are working to comply with the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines. If you’d like to let our web design team know of any improvements you can recommend please feel free to email us at (removed)@confused.com

…. fair enough but I would have put the ALT text “Accessibility” on the image, at least.

It would take ten minutes to clean up the usability and accessibility of the confused.com home page, wonder why they don’t? It’s easy to use online accessibility tools to review a site automatically to identify schoolboy errors.

I shudder to think of the conversion increase if they got that site a usability and accessibility report and acted on it because the internal structure of the site is a dogs dinner. Well I think so anyways.

I dont think I’ve seen a site before that I would give ten out of ten for offline marketing on the TV of the site and think the actual website is bollocks. Im confused.com