Why the Baby Welcome website is pants

Site reviewed on 8th January 2004

Well, it seems I can't even have a few weeks off for my wife to have a baby without some associated website letting me down.

Welcome to Baby Welcome, the site for "expentant mothers and parents". Does that mean parents and expentant mothers or does it mean expentant mothers and expentant parents? The first precludes men with an expentant partner from being included in the site and the second includes expentant women twice. Maybe "the site for recent parents and parents to be" would be less contorted? Anyway, I digress.

So why is this site pants (or should that be nappies?). Check out the nice pictures on the left of the baby feet and the flowers. Then scroll down.

Holy diapers Batman, there's a seismic split in this page bigger than the San Andreas Fault! Even Humpty Dumpty would be pround of this calamity - do you think all the Kings Horses and all the Kings men could join up the images together again?

Whilst that was midly entertaining, the following screen would be enough to keep any sleepless parent entertained for hours. When registering on the site, you are given details of every one elses username and invited to select it and update their profile! Bizarrely, these usernames aren't unique - what is going on there? Judging by the number of question marks that have been entered, it's plainly evident that with a screaming child to deal and a 2 minute window of opportunity between winding junior and changing a nappy, most parents don't seem to have the perseverence to figure out what's supposed to be going on here.

Finally rather than using acronyms such as DOB, if it is meant to mean "Date of Birth" then perhaps having three fields for the date, the month and the year near one another on the same line might help? The above form looks like a random arrangement of play bricks after a toddler's party rather than a logical well thought out webform for busy parents.