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Expecting a delivery sent via DHL, and armed with a consignment number, I attempted to track the package.
Hilarity ensued as the code was not recognised by the fast track box on the front page, an actual pop up appearing to display an error: “Please enter a Number (only one) in the FastTrack Box.” Since my tracking number contained spaces, I stripped these out by hand, and resubmitted. This time I was redirected to the main tracking page, with a “No Result Found” error hidden away in the middle of the page.
I then turned to the On-line Tracking section of this page, which provided a drop down box to select which service the package had been sent with. All I knew was “DHL”, so I tried a couple (DHL Air Waybill, DHL Europlus), but to no avail.
Back up the page was a section titled More Tracking, with UK Domestic as the first link. I presumed that the store I’d bought from was also UK based, so I tried this. I then hit a blank page, with nothing but a retro Netscape favicon to distinguish the fact that I’d hit any kind of page at all. Was the page just broken? I dug into the source with Firebug, and noticed that it was assembled (badly) with javascript writing a frameset onto the page, with no body tag.
So that page looks blank in Firefox, but works perfectly in IE6 which doesn’t mind a webpage not having a body block. Once you’ve worked that all of this out, you can track your package with ease.
Or you could insist on UPS or FedEx the next time, which I would do, given the choice. They can both make websites that work, and have consignment numbering systems that allow them to determine the service used from the number itself.
