Controversial - Rubbish Web Sites

"Chris Wilson" wrote

Exactly the same that I charge to access those pictures! :-)

John.

LOL what for us mere mortals or for the BBC when they need a pic on the hurry-up. :-)

That's the one! Or, "My son/nephew is doing 'computers' at school/college, let's get him to do it." !!

"Chris Wilson" wrote

I don't aim to sell pictures, but if the Beeb or any other commercial organisation want to use any, then they will be charged.

John.

Correct in my case; a user interface design manager for a major UK corporation.

Whilst my site has been quoted as pretty good in the thread, I'm well aware of many inadequacies of the current design, and have a long list of changes to get done. The downside is that whilst I know how to do website design, I'd usually rather do other things at home, so updates are not that frequent.

Or cannot afford decent design, cannot tell a good designer from a poor one, and then get suckered into really bad design for something they don't understand.

In at least one of the cases quoted, you'll find a company that was in denial about the relevance of the internet to its business until well into this century.

And probably even less about navigation. Visual design is only a fraction of the things to get done when designing a website. Having half an idea of what you're hoping the visitors will do when they get to the site is the place to start.

- Nigel

Don't take my comments to heart, just trying to raise a New Years smile.

And if you supplied the BBC with appropriate pictures then the uk.railway group would wither away and die, as there would be no more mass debates about that SWT Vep photo...

On 30/12/2004 13:02, Joe Ellis wrote,

Has anyone tried using the Howes of Oxford website using Firefox. It just tells me I have an incorrect browser. NO I DON'T!!!!!!

I have pointed out that their site is unavailable to the many millions of people who use this browser, but they have chosen to ignore this potential customer base.

"Paul Boyd" wrote

Funny isn't it that those who choose to use industry non-standard browsers expect everyone to accomodate them?

Not a criticism of Firefox or anything else, but I'd never contemplate any browser which wasn't universally useable.

John.

ROFLO !.. :~(((

Firefox is about the most (W3C) industry compliant as it gets.....

Now I am well confused. The models page doesn't seem to have any pictures on it and the photos site has thumbnails of about 3-5K - which is about right. Maybe your definition of thumbnail is not correct? A thumbnail being a small image quickly downloaded and displayed which can usually be clicked for a higher res version. Your thumbnails were perfect on the photos pages because I could see the list of 30 odd images in about 30 seconds.

Anyway, we mustn't milk these conversations too much (like they seem to on uk.railway!!!)

: ) Luke

John Turner wrote:-

Until very recently that was not an option for AOL users. It is now possible to configure Outlook Express to work with AOL but quite complicated and I don't suppose many AOL subscribers have tried it.

(kim)

with Opera I get the very useful:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e37' Invalid object name 'tblBrowserDetails'. /incorrect_browser.asp, line 30

So it is even a broken "p*ss off" message!

Is there such a thing as an industry standard browser? (and what industry?) The /whole point/ of the web is that it doesn't matter what someone is using to access the information. That is why it was developed in the first place. If a website has been properly put together - think of it as like using the correct spelling on a page - it doesn't need to accommodate a browser, as they are accommodated anyway. They problems come when clueless people try to block access to certain browsers.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

- Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, July 1996.

In reality is there such a thing? I find IE a usability disaster - if an author has decided to suggest yellow text on a white background, IE won't even let me apply my own stylesheets in an instant, so that isn't universally usable for me. Turning off the pictures if someone has decided to stick 1 MB images all over a page is fiddly.

Getting a website to work should be pretty important for a business, and checking the HTML against the international, open, published standards should be like checking the spulling on the page's. Perhaps as more people upgrade from IE - and many of them will be the sort of people who spend money online - things will get better*.

*Oink, flutter.

On 05/01/2005 17:53, John Turner wrote,

What do you define as an "industry standard browser"? As far as I know there isn't one, but there is an industry standard that all browsers should conform to. It is called HTTP. OK, I know ActiveX and Java and frames need to be catered for as well, which Firefox does.

I would expect *any* website to conform to published HTTP protocols, not to be dependant on one particular manufacturer's version of that protocol. Howes doesn't comply. Hattons and 99.9% of other websites do. Howes don't get my business. Hattons have had my business. 53A Models complies, so may well get my business in future.

I suppose it's a bit of a poor analogy, but, hypothetically, how about if a TV channel decided to start transmitting, but only one particular brand of television could receive the signal? Would you not exercise you choice of brand, or would you just ignore the channel? I ignore the channel. ("Channel" equ. to website, TV equ. to browser)

I'm not criticising IE (in this context!), but websites that will ONLY work with IE. Firefox isn't prefect (it doesn't do ftp very well), but I like it, and I appreciate you weren't crticising that either!

On 05/01/2005 18:33, kim wrote,

Outlook Express isn't a web browser.....

On 05/01/2005 18:51, Arthur Figgis wrote,

Yup - that's the one. They least they could have done was a "Sorry, but we only support Microsoft" message.

Most AOL users don't have the brains to alter settings on their computers full stop [1], in fact if they did have brains (in most cases) they wouldn't be using AOL !...

AOL adds nothing to the 'internet experiance' but take plenty away, and here I'm talking about user choice, not so called net nasties.

[1] some don't even know the differences between a web browser and a program that can be used to read and send email etc, what do you say Kim ?...... Doh! :~(

Just goes to show how clueless AOL users are...

You have to install Outlook Express before AOL will work properly with Internet Explorer. eg:: I was unable to read Heljan's web site properly before I installed Outlook Express and now I can. It is also now possible to use third party newsservers like the one I'm using now and I suspect other types of browser but I haven't got that far yet.

I've found it a big advantage having an e-mail address or web site ending in aol.com when dealing with American companies or individuals. It's also paid-for and there are no limits on downloads except from certain types of newsgroup for which a third party newsreader is required.

(kim)