Last Friday I read about a new language site called trymango.com. I have a life goal to be fluent in Spanish (scroll to the bottom of the page), so I immediately registered for this online language learning site. To my surprise the application did not work in FireFox. So next, I tried IE and the application loaded partially… Check out the screen capture.

After hours of trying, I can not get this site to work. It just sits on loading for hours. This leads me to the point of this post, if your site is not ready for primetime keep it locked down. This site is not even ready to be called beta. We are not talking about a ton of priority one bugs; the site does not work at all.

Releasing a site in this state is a quick way to blow through potential customers and risk your company’s reputation.

It is in Beta so I guess I really can’t complain. Right? Wrong. I see many companies releasing buggy software and applications and slapping the word beta on them so they can tell their users “but it’s beta, we are still working out the bugs…”

Traffic is only one side of the equation. I hope TryMango.com can work through their issues, because it seems like a great idea and I really want to get on with my Spanish lessons.

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