Re: OT: Mozilla/Firefox (was:Re: Windoze ends year with a major cert ...)

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> Like I said above, reality check time. The university has contracted
> it's web design out to a third party. Users on the web have no access
> to (or even the ability to identify) this entity. So the only person
> you can complain to has no control over it.

Then, you escalate to the very top. I had a similar experience with Bell
Canada (a large civil service paper pushing former-monopoly telephone
company). I sent a techical complaint to "webmaster" address. I got a
bounce message that jdoe@xxxxxxxxxxx didn't exist.

So essentially, any complaints to the webmaster was going to an invalid
mailbox at the outsourced web design company.

I sent an email to the president of Bell. Started off that this wasn't a
complaint to him, but pointing to him a quality assurance issue within
his company. Mentioned that Bell wasn't seeing complaints about their
web site that could be used to gauge contractor performance, but that
the outsourced company was bouncing them. Additionally, Bell had not
even noticed that complaints going to the contractor were bouncing.

Within a couple of days, I got an email back from someone much lower
telling me that they had found my original complaint from logs and would
make sure that the address worked. Bell has always been very concerned
about their image. So while I was pleased to see a response, I was not surprised.



At the other extreme: Air Canada had a contract with one large
consulting firm to design its error-laden web site, and another large
consulting firm to provide customer support. AC was totally out of the
loop. The customer support company could only tell customers the web
equivalent of "press return after you entered your username" and had no
relationship with the web design company so there was no pipe to funnel
description of problems and design issues. (One of these companies was
IBM, so we're not talking small basement operations here).


When you point out to people high enough that their web site does not
adhere to international standards and that if they did, they coudl cater
to all users of the web, it strikes a nerve. Unless you are a slave to
Microsoft (like HP), adhering to HTML standards *should* be a priority.
.

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