Jullian’s Musings

I assume some of the readers here are also involved in some aspects of web development and / or being in the decision-making process of approving a web development.

I recently visited the website of my bank (Bank Permata - http://www.permatabank.com) and tried out their web. The look is quite OK, but it was extremely annoying to experience the usability of the site. It is practically unusable lest you use M$IE. I think this is a very fatal mistake that I know many other sites are committing. Some mistakes that they (and many other sites) makes:

1. Links that only works with JavaScript
   This is an unbelievably stupid blunder. Why do they need to make it so, although there are many other ways of doing it easier, simpler, and better? Other than that, these types of links are not spiderable by many search engines. Plus, get this…. they have a contact us link that, I’m not kidding, doesn’t lead anywhere.
2. Links that uses form elements (such as button)
   Also almost impossible to spider properly, and extremely unaccesible for screen reader, PDAs, and others. This also is a signal that the web designer never considers the structure of the document whatsoever.
3. Links that is totally with pictures (no alternate text)
   What if somebody deactivate image display? Any considerations also for the visually impaired?
4. Table-based design.
   Well, I’m not going to discuss this here. Just go to Google and look for why you shouldn’t use table as document structure, or you can browse here: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/everything.html
5. Never been tested other than with M$IE
   Some designers forget (or lazy) that they never test their sites on browsers other than IE. Never mind that IE almost always renders the wrong version of a website compared on how it should look like. Never mind that they can just download other browsers easily such as Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Opera, etc. I guess they are just extremely lazy, no other reason. These developers does not care that many users cannot use the site at all, remember, Linux users don’t have IE on their computers, but Windows users can install many browsers. So why not download these other browsers, develop on them because they are more standards based, and also check on IE whether it can be used there? It is much more productive and less time consuming to develop on Gecko-based browsers and fix for IE than vice-versa.

Well, why is it important anyway? There are a couple reason for this.

First of all, M$IE is a notoriously buggy and unsafe browser. Just by not using IE, users of Windows can cover many holes that are built in the operating system. Again, IE is notorious for that. By creating sites that forces people to use IE to function, people that have switched for IE are forced either to open IE again, making their computers vulnerable again, or not use the site at all. In my opinion, this is counter productive to say the least.

Secondly, M$IE does not support many technologies that potentially can make browsing a much better experience, such as:

• Proper CSS (cascading style sheet) rendering. Websites that are beautiful are many times screwed by IE. Look here to test your browser: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/
• Proper support for Transparent PNG http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html. The horrible .gif that we all loathe are not needed anymore, but IE does not support it, because it does not easily support PNG’s alpha-transparency.
• IE still can not do tabbed browsing. What the hell? Why use many windows while you can use many tabs within one window? All Geckos support this, and even Opera. Why not IE?
• IE only works on Windows and Mac. Many other browsers works anywhere, such as Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, Solaris, Handheld, etc.
• And many more reasons why IE sucks.

However, nothing illustrates why good design is so important better than what I’m going to say next: Bad design refletcts poorly on the owner of the website. What my bank is portraying through its site is that they are a bank that only support some of its customers, but not all. They only care of customers that they think exists, not those they they think aren’t. This is extremely fatal.