October 20, 2003
Bad E-Commerce Web Site
Inspired by NTK I'm going to start keeping a list of sites that have bad usability. The primary criteria for inclusion is not embracing web standards.
The biggest crime, in my book at least, is designing your web site so that it only works with Internet Explorer.
Our first two candidates our both in the retail business, in fact they're both wine sellers. Say hello to Oddbins and Virgin Wines.
The really bad thing, from my point of view, is that you can browse the catalogue on both sites and even add things to your basket at Virgin Wines. But they have made assumptions that you are running IE which only become apparent when you try and order. There is, sadly, no accessibility statement or list of supported browsers that I can find on either site. Bad, bad web sites.
I'm sure they won't notice the lack of my custom, but its the least I can do in the circumstances. That and send them an email pointing them to the Web Standards Project and the writings of Mr Zeldman.
Posted by Andy Todd at October 20, 2003 05:04 PM
I visited the Microsoft site a few days again, and it had the pleasure in telling me that I wasn't using an MSIE browser. Funny thing is I'm actually using MSIE6 (Opera at home though)
Posted by: Mark Boyce on October 31, 2003 09:16 AM