Why the Open University website is pants

Site reviewed on 7th January 2004

Went to the Open University site to order some back up materials for a TV programme I'd been watching. Had I been using Internet Explorer, this is the page I would have seen, a page with links to the relevant supporting materials.

However, I was using Mozilla and this is the fine mess I was presented with. A blank page!

Moral of this story: If you develop your site against HTML standards you'll probably find it will work in all major browsers without problems. If your validated page doesn't work on some browsers, maybe its a bug with the browser. If however, you test your site against Internet Explorer and it looks a mess in other browsers, then you'll need to spend additional time and effort fixing the problem and it will be you as a web designer rather than the people who wrote the browser who will be at fault. If you think you don't need to test against different browsers, then think again - it is a requirement for a website to be accessible by disabled people and if it doesn't even display correctly in a standards compliant browser such as Mozilla, what chance has your site got of being displayed correctly by a screen reader used by blind people?