Outchurched

Just about every time I visit BibleGateway.com I almost end up tearing out what little hair I have left in sheer frustration. Why would they put a search box in the top [looks like a word/topic search] and also have a search box below which only allows you to type in the name of the book you want to find in a particular translation?

There are only 66 books, and they don’t change. [ok, there are more if you’re Catholic, but that’s not the point] Why require your users to type in names of the books of the Bible? That’s a prime candidate for a dropdown box, which would eliminate the overhead necessary to do a lookup on poorly entered or misspelled book names. Users would get what they’re looking for faster, and processing overhead would be reduced. If you’ve gotta have a search box for the books, how about adding some javascript to auto-complete the book name? Reduced user input = reduced margin for error.

Beyond that, I personally can’t seem to remember that I have to use the search box in the top, and always go for the lower box [which only searches on book names]. That’s the bit I find frustrating.

Ok, I’m done giving whiny QA away for free (oh, and you don’t need to tell me how bad this site sucks [design/content/snark/grammar]… it’s my job to point out that things are broken, not fix them. No, literally, that’s my job.). :)

Does anyone have any suggestions for a similar site? I want/need an easy way to drop in Scripture quotations into blog posts without having to copy and paste back and forth. I think there might be a WordPress plugin that simplifies quotations, but it’d be nice to use something a little more universal.

This entry was posted by Rev. Dan on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 9:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.