We were pretty happy to finally launch the Smartpen website last week. However, since going live we’ve experienced a project-reality disconnect (as we now refer to them) that relates to how we put the Smartpen website together.
Short Story – If you’re using Internet Explorer 6 to browse our website you will experience problems completing your order. If this is the case, please email us at support@smartpen.com.au or call us on (1300) 305 514 so we can process your order.
We don’t care whether you can or can’t upgrade to a better browser, we’re sorry you experienced issues purchasing from us. We will have support for IE6 in place by 11/4 EST and will continue to support the browser until the end of 2009.
The Long Story - As with some (or most) things in IT, the smart people (i.e. the geeks) often make development decisions that (in their opinion) at that point in time seem “optimal” given the project constraints.
A really good example of this is a project decision to build the site without support for IE6, despite the fact that Google Analytics is clearly showing this browser (like it or hate it) is used in 27% of visits to our site.
What does this mean?
We screwed up.
We should have built the site with IE 6 in mind but we didn’t and we have probably paid the ultimate price in that we encouraged customers to seek an alternative supplier.
