Web developers: Don't feel too bad if your websites have a few bugs

I know there are bugs in most (all?) of the websites I have developed, and I feel bad when I find a bug and wonder how long it's been there.

But no matter how many bugs there are in your code, there's probably a worse website... Yahoo!

It amazes me how a large company like Yahoo - with all their resources and no doubt a large team of programmers - can have so many serious bugs in their website.

I recently wanted to investigate Yahoo's Gemini advertising service, as I am getting a bit sick of Google AdWords and it's ridiculous number of resources that need to load just to show one advertisement.

First issue... I have an old Yahoo account, and I can log in to this account, but it seems to be an old account that doesn't allow me to make any changes to update my account, just an error message"Yahoo Profile (profile.yahoo.com) is no longer active" and a link to learn more about the error that doesn't really help at all.

Okay, no problem, I'll create a new account. Second issue... The Yahoo CAPTCHA is showing a mixture of upper and lower case so I enter the characters exactly as I see them. It takes me a few failed attempts until I try all lower case, even though they show as upper case, and I finally succeed.

Let's check my account settings and set my preferences. From the Yahoo home page I click my name in the top right corner which brings up a drop down menu of choices. Third issue... As soon as my mouse leaves my name the drop down disappears. It seems impossible to select anything from this menu! Why have a click-to-activate drop down menu that disappears on hover?



I move on to Yahoo's Gemini website and attempt to sign up. At this point I am using my Windows Phone 8.1 and trying to select my country but - fourth issue - Yahoo are using their own SELECT replacement drop down menus which do not let me scroll through the choices, so although I want to select Australia, I am stuck down at the end of the alphabet because United States is the default value.

I switch to the desktop and I can now select my country but when I attempt to select my time zone I see - fifth issue - that there are duplicate time zones in the list with no obvious difference. Oh well, choose anyone I guess.



Ready to sign up now? Nope, sixth issue, I see a message saying that only US based companies are supported at this time. Why not show this message before I fill out the form? Why allow me to select from several hundred countries if only one is supported?



Time to give up on Yahoo!