This is something that intrigues me pretty much: design companies / people who claim themselves the trophy for great products and yet they suck. I tag these guys as corrupt kings or napoleons of the web because they think they are the best at what they do and yet they don’t and no one tells them so!

I met a client a couple days ago. He asked me to retake on a project that used a very strange platform. “Please take a look at the current launch, José”. What do I do? I Browse CSS, accessibility, usability and source code. The apparently awarded CMS was built on a table based layout and it didn’t show the same results over different browsers. And you say: “OK, so what’s the problem with designing on top of a table layout ?” If it works on many browsers and you can’t afford web standards, well… keep it! But if it comes out as a complete junk like this, I would be ashamed of myself. The website looks like this in Internet Explorer (6 & 7 look pretty similar), Firefox and Safari.

Any napoleon with this level of costumer fidelity - yea, the costumers say they have really great products! my gosh… - ought to be better prepared to face the real challenge, when users start to realize there are many browsers to choose from, new technologies improve user experience and designers and developers create the web differently with more care for performance, beauty and usability. Are you a designer reading this? Take a look at web standards and cross-browser experience. I’m sure you’ll like it.

3 comments so far

1. Gonçalo wrote on September 29, 2008:

   That is a scenario everywhere. Almost every client wants a website at least compatible with IE because unfortunately it’s still the predominant browser.

2. Filipe Pina wrote on October 4, 2008:

   The “Corrupt Kings” title is funny due to the context (corrupted web, breaking web), “Napoleons” seems a little bit out.

   Obviously the appeal you made is necessary and repeated all over the web, maybe we should stop appealing to the designers/developers, instead, let’s appeal to the client. Let them know what are web standards and why they should require them at the end of a project!

   Btw, that’s a great job on those pictures! You really should let the world know who’s responsible for that master piece

   And to Gonçalo… wtf?! The man is talking about cross-browser compatibility! And he advocates it!!! Not the other way around! (and i think you are trying to say IE6… IE7 is bad, but not that 6 nightmare)

   Cheers!

3. Gonçalo wrote on October 4, 2008:

   Filipe,

   I’m not advocating against cross-browser compatibility. I’m merely remarking about the reality when it comes to build a project and having these types of concerns when conceptualizing.

   I’m all in favor with cross-browser compatility but the work that requires mainly for IE (any version) is still a nightmare. (Only 22 % on Acid3 web standards test).

Post yourself a comment