Posted on Monday 26th of February 2007 at 09:39 in Notices

Madness on the Ford website

While browsing for new cars I stumbled across a slightly worrying piece of web design.

Ford, the car giants behind the Focus, Mondeo, GT, Fiesta to name just a few have some weird behaviour on their website.

What I noticed
Whamming "ford.co.uk" into Opera's address bar redirected me to a rather fugly url:
http://www.ford.co.uk/opera/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

Eh? I thought, are they seriously using different folders for different browsers or just employing some bizarre virtual mappings.

Firefox
Using Firefox 2 made the url:
http://www.ford.co.uk/ns7/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

IE7?
http://www.ford.co.uk/ie/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

What the jazz?


I don't know what it's doing but I don't see how that's possibly good practice or acceptable for SEO purposes. Mapping a URL into website.com/browser/home/-/rt/rt_home/-/-/-/- etc isn't good and I don't understand why.

Shame on you Ford for not using clean URL's. Shame on you indeed. Of course if you know the reason why you'd want to do this then please leave me comments - it's the only way I'll learn!

 

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Showing most recent 4 of 4 comments

seems to me, they overcomplicated the site structure.

most likely due to foolish notions of upper management, not developers.

and now, trying to accomplish simple detection is impossible due to the number of stupid complications.

IT Consultant in NYC.

P.S. - I love my 2000 Taurus with its metallic flexible fuel engine and tank-like durability

too bad Ford is so behind the times, and now trying to catch up, and that they have lost soo much market share, and what they did to Flint, Michigan
... Just to add to that ...
Detecting the browser ("User-Agent") can be done server-side before sending output to the browser, so this is actually redundant! Which makes this crazy!!
Hey there,

They’re simply mapping ’folders’ virtually - like you suggested. Such as mapping
domain.com/abc/123/def/678
to
domain.com/?page=abc&variable=123&somethingelse=def¬hing=678

But if you do a mapping like:
domain.com/PAGE/VARIABLE/SOMETHINGELSE/NOTHING

And you don’t need "SOMETHINGELSE" then you get
domain.com/PAGE/VARIABLE/NOTHING
which maps incorrectly (maps somethingelse to what nothing should be, still following?!?! I’m not!).

So, they use /-/-/-/-/- using ’-’ to say "no value". As for the browser, it’s just being mapped to
domain.com/index.php?browser=BROWSER

It could be seen as cloaking - but as it’ll (surely?!) be legitimate, it’s not. It’s just a hack to display different minute variations depending on browser, but like Heliologue said, a client-side JavaScript would have sufficed.
I hope they didn’t pay their designers very much. If they’re so wedded to a particular design that they have to hack a kludge to get it to work, they could at least use the detection script to make client-side changes for a particular page---having to maintain X number of different pages, one for each browser, must be a nightmare

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