The Virgin Money website is not as Firefox friendly as they claim.
When trying to apply for their credit card, I found their validations for your personal details are really badly broken.
See the screenshot:
Their site requirements states:
We support any browser with SSL 2.0; SSL 3.0 and a 128 bit cipher, but our site is best viewed by using Internet Explorer 6.0 SP 1, or Netscape 7.2 or Firefox 1.5. You can confirm your browser version by selecting the Help drop-down menu and then clicking on the About option.
I am using Firefox, so what is the problem Sir Branson?
You launch a product with all the flash and fanfare and media but *the site doesn’t work!!!*
I hope their banking software developers can build better applications than their web development team, because right now if I had a Virgin Money card, I wouldn’t feel so secure.
Tags: virgin money, credit card, credit, bank, vmoney, richard branson, firefox, compatibility, browser, browser wars
5 replies on “Virgin Broken Firefox Website”
Wow that’s bad. I was thinking about applying for a card too.
Started filling out the form after reading your blog and without filling in the DOB, clicked on the “next step” button. I was prompted with a different error each time I clicked on the button without making further changes to my details – either “please enter valid initials” (what’s wrong with “DR”?) or “Only numeric characters accepted in the ID field” (which they were) or just an unhelpful “this field is required”.
Shocking. I sent them an e-mail, so let’s wait and see. 🙂
Yeah I’ve emailed them too.
Oh, the initials – that was the worst!
What killed me too was the fact that DOB was autocompleted when you stick in your ID number, and yet it still fails validation!!!
Eventually I actually managed to get an application submitted using Internet Explorer, but wow, even with IE the validations went a bit crazy – having things like commas in addresses and dashes in company names were all thrown out.
All in all, not the experience I expected.
even worse, MWEB’s page to inflate my draconian cap also doesn;t work in ff! can you like to believe it, the self proclaimed internet gurus can’t even get a simple site to work in the internet guru’s favourite browser. alas, had to finally dust of ie to pay for it.
Just sent email to virgin money as follows:
Hi,
Having recently tried to apply online for a virgin c card using firefox I found that the form validation has serious bugs. Please fix this asap as it seems to be a problem that is continuing from month to month without being fixed. This is not an isolated case, please refer to the comments on this link: https://dewberry.co.za/index.php/2006/07/19/virgin_broken_firefox_website
As a web professional I have dealt with a number of clients that would make a big fuss if they found that a form on their website does not work. It only takes one person to take a casual approach to their job to tarnish the reputation of a company and create customer dissatisfaction. If people find such a glaring error on the website and realise that it is not being rectified after they have taken time to notify the company concerned, serious doubts are raised as to the integrity of Virgin Money’s other internet application interfaces. If the relative simple process of validation of a form cannot be completed without error, what are they doing with my money? While I’m sure they are two completely different departments, it is human nature to think if one side of things can break then the other might also be prone to errors.
Could you please acknowledge this email so that I know that the relevant person has been notified and something will eventually been done to rectify this error.
Kind regards,
*********
Wow! Great email Tristan!