The Static PageThe Static Page
main pagelatest static pagearchives
In a previous article, I commented how the web appeared to be bifurcating: turning into sites that required IE and sites that didn't particularly care. Well, I can now say that I've seen a website come back from the brink of IE-ness.
First some background. I decided to change my who I did my banking with some 8 months ago. The why is not important, other than to say the bank I was changing from had been purchased by a much bigger bank with a distinctly lower reputation for customer service. The criteria I had for picking another bank to take my custom also didn't have anything to do with Internet services, though I was aware that banks in Australia were dabbling in that, some more than others. The bank I eventually chose was St. George, one of Australia's smaller banks. I hadn't really noticed before I opened my account, but St. George was big on helping their customers understand and use their electronic banking technology - IOW, phone banking and Internet banking. Really big. My previous bank got customers to call the help centre to register; St. George encouraged you to visit a branch where they could show you how it worked more easily. They even had a test account for showing how the Internet Banking worked.
So I tried Internet Banking from my PC. As you know, I usually run Opera. Well, it didn't work. Yep: their web site was expecting me to be using IE or Netscape 4. I found a feedback form and asked what it would take for Opera to be supported. The reply was nice but rather along the lines of "We take our customers seriously and appreciate your concerns". So I stuck with humble telephone banking.
Like I said, that was 8 months ago. But just today it occurred to me to try again, mostly because if Opera failed, I have a recent IE on my work machine to do it with instead. Imagine my surprise when it worked. And worked flawlessly: I had to visit an ATM later on for some cash and noticed the updated balance. It seems that St George were genuine when they acknowledged my concern about HTTML standards 8 months ago and in the interim suitably upgraded their web site. This is how customer-service should work!
Wade Bowmer, aka Static.
P.S. I know some of you will not think the current site that much of an improvement - after all, it still uses JavaScript. Moreover, the online banking interface itself is a Java Applet. I suspect this fact alone may have helped them support more browsers: IE6 doesn't come with a JVM, does it?
P.P.S. I emailed them with a thank you. I wonder what sort of response I will get.
Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.
