The new Edgars website? Just imagine.

During the beginning of November, I wrote briefly about the new Edgars website - www.edgars.co.za. Having visited again a few weeks later, I found that attempts had been made to correct almost everything that I had mentioned. Coincidence or not, the fact remains that nothing they changed is for the better.

My first impression of the site is that it's not new at all.

Edgars have taken the 'Microsoft Internet Explorer-only' approach and now find themselves listed with other like-minded local websites. Meaning, if you visit their site with any other browser, you're completely banned from entering and end up here, an unpresentable page reading "edgars.co.za has been designed for Internet Explorer version 5 or greater".

It makes me think back to the days when the browser wars were still raging, and for many web developers it was either support one browser or the other. Supporting both meant an increase in research & development time, and a larger project budget to account for these changes, among other things.

Luckily for us, those days are over. Browser manufacturers have come to realise the benefits of supporting W3C standards - allowing us to create a single, standard-compliant website that is accessible by all users, independent of their browser, operating system, platform, etc. Eventually the same website will be accessible by mobiles and other portable devices; in some instances there isn't reason why they shouldn't be already.

You might argue that Internet Explorer has dominance in the user market and there is little motivation to support the other 10% of the browsers. Or that modern browsers are still too buggy and inconsistent in the way they render your pages. If that's the case, you're clearly uninformed and are more than likely just repeating what someone told you five years ago when Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 were first released. The web has evolved and matured, and with multiple case studies and reports on hand, so have our perceptions.

Forward compatibility has taken a front seat over backward compatibility - would you rather develop a website to cater for browsers two years old, or future browsers two years from today, considering how rapidly web technology is moving?

Not a single part of the Edgars website frontend is IE specific. So unable to find a single reason for their decision, I sent them an e-mail, only to receive reply that my questions had been forwarded. I haven't heard anything since. So, curious to discover the rest of the site, I took a deep breath, forced myself to open Internet Explorer and proceeded.

The first thing I noticed was the popup window, with rather amusing content. It reads: "This site has been designed to support your preferred browser text size". But it should read "This site has been designed to support your browser's text size preference" - since Internet Explorer is NOT my preferred browser. Not only that, but the average web user might ask themselves why an online retailed is providing them with instructions on how to change their browser's text size settings?

Quick investigation reveals that their style sheet has specified the font-size for the site as "smaller", which is more than likely leaving the text unreadable in particular circumstances. Providing a popup window with instructions for the visitor to solve it themselves is nothing more than a feeble excuse for a solution.

The next thing I noticed was the new colour scheme, replacing the bright summer blues they had previously. Fair enough, they're acknowledging the Festive Season. The layout however is still inconsistent. Depending on your screen resolution, the width of the site extends only to whatever the page contains, so in some cases the layout will stretch to fit your browser width, and in some cases it only fills half your screen.

Having clicked through the menu and now at some product page, I want to go back to the opening page. There is no visible link that will return you to their home page. But having years of experience on the web, I know that a logo is usually a means for returning to the home page. Previously, clicking on the logo would have resized your browser and moved it across your desktop to a new location. So, expecting the worst, I mouse over the logo. My mouse cursor remains the same, but if I leave it there long enough, the alternative text of the image appears reading "return to home page" (example). I click on the logo and it directs me back. Seem ok? Not quiet.

1. The average user will not know to do this, and even if they did, there is no visible indication that this logo is a link until clicked or unless they mouse over it until the image's alternative text appears.
2. The reason for no visible mouse cursor change is that they use JavaScript for the link. Take into consideration that 11% of web users have JavaScript disabled, and you have an unnecessary accessibility flaw, and four lines of JavaScript code that could be replaced with the most basic anchor link. It sounds trivial, but it all adds up in an environment where size matters.

The more I browse through the site, the more impression I get that it was launched incomplete, with the intent to make the most of the Christmas season and the related spike in online spending. As a developer I'm very familiar with the "shortcuts" you can take to complete a site before deadline. While I've never been in this situation myself, it would seem that Edgars were. One of these shortcuts is using images instead of text - dropping a single image into a page is so much faster than styling and laying out the text around the image. The accessibility problems with applying this shortcut are obvious, excluding the fact that their popup message mentioned earlier is completely meaningless when applied to this context.

I haven't come across other major updates, other than their changing the logo to no longer contain their slogan, "Just Imagine", which would make sense since users without Internet Explorer wouldn't see the irony in this slogan anyway, and know that they'd need to "Just Imagine".

All things said, the site does download quickly and the design is fairly clean and easy to navigate despite the above-mentioned flaws. But until they realise the benefits and accept my browser of choice, Mozilla, I'm quite happy to spend my money elsewhere, along with the rest of their visitors who are denied access.