I've recently been asked to look at an ecommerce site and give my opinion on the quality of the work, it's for a family friend and they're not happy with the site so far.

It's a bespoke ecommerce system, most of his dislikes are around the backend, which is important as he'd probably be using the thing 2-4 hours a day and as his only stock inventory. There's also no way to backup/restore atm

The current developer refuses to look into open source platforms like Magneto/OpenCart, but to be fair the budget is tiny for what's required. I think they've both underestimated what's needed


Anyway, I looked at the code. No heading tags whatsoever, extremely bad case of divitus, obtrusive JavaScript, JavaScript in the HTML, two JavaScript libraries with ajax shortcuts yet longhand ajax in the JS, horrible URLS too. The homepage weighs in at over 1.2Mb with 56 errors and 11 warnings

Any tips on providing feedback that dosen't sound like all I'm doing is finding flaws in the developers work?

Just tell them it's a load of badly coded junk and leave it that, they will either accept what you say or not.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Just tell them it's a load of badly coded junk and leave it that, they will either accept what you say or not.

Or, if you want it sugar-coated, "Your coding could use some work.."

Gotta tell them how it is and from your post, I think what you have just mentioned is professional, courteous and cautious enough.

The developer probably doesn't want to try out Magento because he has already started the job (as you mentioned) and therefore it would be a complete waste of time to ditch the system and go open source.

The best step here would be to fix these errors!!