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Download FireFox 3 on the 17th June 2008

Was just away to order the monthly supply of books from Amazon.co.uk and i noticed they have had a redesign. Not overly keen on the visuals of the site as a whole, but when looking through i am stunned to see three basic, fundamental errors that is quite shocking to see on one of the worlds most visited and profitable online businesses.

1.) Viewing on a 1024 x 768 monitor there is side scroll ! If Amazon are saying that this is now, a depreciated size of monitor, they are mistaken.

2.) A click here link? Imagine a user viewing the page with a screenreader, (which is software that reads out web pages for blind users), is going to read out “Click Here”. This means absolutely nothing to them, the link should be descriptive and read the text to the left of the actual link : “Forgot your password”. This would helps to users they understand what they are about to click on, and navigate to. Imagine if a page had a 15 “click here” links. How is anyone going to navigate that page with ease! This would help both accessibility and usability of the site.

3.) Last but certainly not least, viewing the source code of Amazon.co.uk shows its riddled with tables, inline css and javascript. The worst offender of the three being tables, which could inspire a whole series of blog posts, why not to use them, alone.

Overall

Now these are three basic errors that i came across within minutes of being on the site. Im quite sure there would be be many more, on further inspection.

I’m shocked, annoyed and disappointed that in 2008, a business so “credible” as Amazon are have redesigned their site to such a low standard.

Being on Vista since launch date ( coming up to a year a and half believe it or not !) we have had to revert to older PCs to check what web sites look and perform on with IE 6 and 7.

With IE6 still having a prominent (and unfortunate) foothold of up to 40% on some of our sites, its absolutely vital the site is fully tested and rendered in this browser. Its sometimes possible to get away with one stylesheet that covers all the browsers, well i say all, but Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6 and IE7*. Internet Explorer 7 renders far better than 6 but still suffers from little blemishes here and there. It is sometimes necessary to use conditional stylesheets when the lovely guys at Microsoft’s software just wont step into line, despite contengincy measures.

A little off topic with the conditionals but the point is that IE6 needs to be tested in. It wasnt possible till now on Vista, but the fantastic guys at DebugBar have come up with an app that you can test any version of IE in Vista and XP.

The software is still in Alpha but this is looking very promising indeed. Its about time for something be available. However it really should be Microsoft that had something developed, web designers are the ones that spend millions of hours getting CSS to play nice because their own software isn’t up to scratch.

* These are the main web browsers but sometimes IE5 other minority share web browsers need to tested in. It all depends, as with most things in web design, with the target audience.

P.S : If you relatively new to to the web design scene you are very lucky indeed IE’s market share has almost disappeared.  Think coding difficulty for IE6 multiplied by 3.