So I was shopping for a new TV. My TV is starting to act up, as well as not always showing NTSC DVDs in colour and having a nasty old fashioned square screen.

Whilst looking around the Currys website I noticed a great big button in the left-hand menu marked “Netscape Users”. I can’t link to the page because of the Broadvision content management system they’re using, but here’s what it says:

This site has been optimized for Netscape 4.5 and Internet Explorer. Users of Mozilla based browsers such as Netscape 6 and above and the Opera browser, will experience compatibility issues while trying to browse our site, this is due to the inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Netscape’s handling of javacode and certain html tags.

ooo get that … javacode and misbehaving html tags! Let me point out at this point that Currys are part of a retail giant called Dixons Group PLC who also own PC World and Dixons electrical retailers, whose sites appear to be based on the same system and therefore also fail to work in any Mozilla based browser. (Presumably also due to nasty javacode.)

The problem would actually appear to lie with their DHTML menus. Standards compliant, cross browser DHTML menus are not difficult to implement. I bet they’d blame it on the CMS as well as the browsers if you pushed them. I bet it doesn’t work in Safari either.

It’s not like these guys have no money to invest in their online stores. In fact, it’s not like it would even cost any more to get their sites right if they’d bothered to think about it from the outset. From the mere fact that they are capable of putting such an idiotic statement on their website is a fair indicator that whoever was responsible for this project on behalf of the Dixons Group was insufficiently qualified, and whichever development company was hired to produce this string of monstrosities was, at best, badly chosen.

It is immensely frustrating to see this sort of thing amongst big companies who really should know better, and certainly have enough clout to demand more. If the agency you’re using can’t deliver a site that will allow its visitors to use the site to its full, then umm .. change your agency. If your content management system prevents you from achieving this goal, then what the hell is it actually achieving for you? Get the vendors to fix it. Demand that the vendors fix it. If they can’t fix it, return the damn thing and change your vendor.

First and foremost, however, be sufficiently educated to know when you’re being taken for a ride. Make it your business to know that there ain’t no such thing as javacode, because if that isn’t your business, what is?