naughty hyro, bad hyro! you made a mess!!

Back a couple of years, when I was ‘between jobs’ I targeted a lot of web and multimedia design studios that I thought were the ‘cream’ of the crop. One of them was Hyro. Good clients, nice work… definitely something to aspire to. I thought!

Quick change to last week, when I’m getting quotes on health insurance from a site I’d found useful before: iselect.com.au. Register mild interest when I find it’s been redesigned. Definitely a bit more dynamic and a nod of approval to see it’s been done by hyro.

Approval turns to puzzlement as it doesn’t seem to work properly – never mind, I prefer Safari, but I’m grown up enough to realise that not all sites comply with standards. I’ll try a more forgiving browser… Netscape 7.1. Still doesn’t work. Camino, Firefox, IE, Mozilla, Opera (I’ve got ’em all!) – not one mac browser lets me access the site.

Finally get somewhere using Virtual PC and IE6, but even then the status bar flashes a little icon that there are some ‘undefined objects’ and ‘unterminated strings’ whatever that all means.

How can this still be happening in 2004? a company is effectively cutting off 10% of it’s potential market. (at least! – we’re talking home users here, where the mac is a much more significant platform – and who knows what happens if you don’t use IE on windows!)

Not only that, but they’ve no doubt paid hyro handsomely for the privilege! Shouldn’t there be some comeback for companies that are given defective web pages?

I’m not even going to go into the usability – the menus are all over the place. There are four separate navigation areas on the home page!

Naughty hyro! naughty, naughty web design!!