Mark's Musings

A miscellany of thoughts and opinions from an unimportant small town politician and bit-part web developer

Gillette.com FAIL

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Go to www.gillette.com and see what it looks like. If you’re in the US, then it will look like it’s supposed to. But if youre in the UK (and, for all I know, anywhere else in the world, then you get this rather unfortunate error page:

That’s the default ASP.net error message. It happens when someone hasn’t programmed the site correctly. In this case, what appears to be happening is that the server is trying to detect where you’re coming from, by checking your IP address, and then redirecting you accordingly. This is happening correctly when you visit it from a US-based computer, so anyone in the US will see the correct page. And since, presumably, the administrators of gillette.com are based in the US, they don’t have a clue that it’s broken for the rest of the world (or, at least, for the UK – I can’t test it from anywhere other than the UK and the US).

Apparently, it’s been like this since early January. The products may be “The best a man can get”, if their advertising slogan is anything to go by (although I prefer the King of Shaves Azor – it’s better and cheaper), but that seemingly doesn’t apply to their staff policy.