IEC website punishes its visitors for NOT using ancient technology!
I wrote about something similar regarding sabc one’s website, but this time I stumbled upon a worse situation.
Firstly, let me start by educating those of you who aren’t website developers. There’s a traditional web design strategy called progressive enhancement, simply put:
a website must be developed in such a way that all users are able to access basic content and functionality of a web page regardless of their browser or internet connection.
IEC’s website is however doing the opposite which is quite disturbing. I get this message while trying to access their website on FireFox 3 on a Leopard OS (Mac):
Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website. The current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system.
I always find it disturbing for organizations which can afford professional services but somehow decide not to invest in one.
The other issue that I believe contributes to situation like this is the fact that people tend to make website development a once-off thing, once live websites still need to be monitored and maintained… it doesn’t necessarily have to be updating of new content only – the website (developers) should take advantage and benefit from newly available technologies, that emerged after the site was launched.
The last part of the error on IEC’s website (shown to us visitors who does not ‘meet’ their site’s technological requirements) states that the site is currently under construction to rectify the situation.
We sit and wait hope.
.
This horrible, especially this would be regarded as a widely used site, this then limits users which use other browsers besides IE which this day in age is out of favour because of it’s security.
Ouch… even worse the site looks horrible on IE… It’s an insult to our profession + passion
Kabelo Masuku,
Now that’s interesting, as they mentioned that it works fine on IE.
At least there were people waiting when I went to register my new address.Would have been bad, if I arrived, and no party to greet me…Reminds me that the real world stills sometimes works better than the internet world!
Yes and a real world developer sat there and did that site, real world testers tested it and a real world project manager signed it off for go-live… Thanks a lot real world, I’ll stay in my virtual world
I just posted a comment on your entry regarding the SABC’s one website when I saw the link to this article.
You were right. This is worse. Not because of technical issues, but because the website tells a bold-faced lie. If there were a detection mechanism in place, it would be easy for a web developer to tell. I won’t go into details on that. (hint: ____script). In short, their server detects fokol!!
And this for website that is about to be visited by millions of locals and people abroad during the 2009 elections?? How embarrassing!
And what’s the deal with the deprecated td tags on bot the culprit websites?
It’s enough to give me Postal Worker Syndrome. Mokokoma, nice work on the site by the way. I really enjoy hanging around here. Keep up the good magic.
Sifiso,
Like I said on the Sabc website issue, it’s disturbing to see this when the budget was surely not an issue.
Thanks for your compliment on my work, I’m glad you enjoyed your stay!
My bad. Please scratch my previous comment. The site does go through on i.e. So these guys are not liars (…?). On Firefox, when you specify the page ‘default.asp’ it redirects you to ‘netscape.htm’. So that’s where the redirection logic must reside.
Isn’t it convenient that web observers of the upcoming elections will be forced to use i.e. or stay in the dark. No, I’m not suggesting conspiracy theories by a certain large software corporation which shall remain nameless.
And does it really require R3m to fix a technical glitch ? Porting the whole thing to apache servers or Ruby on Rails will do the trick for much less than that.