I got an email from Quark the other day (strange, since I’ve never bought their product) announcing their redesigned website. Ooh goody, thought the web designer in me, a new website. So I simply had to give it a look. First thing I noticed (after I noticed that I liked their old design better) was that their big image in the middle of the page looks funny when you hover the mouse over it. Seems like a quirk, I thought – maybe some issue with Safari (I use a Mac, naturally), so I opened it up in Firefox, and sure enough, their main image is freaky weird when you look at their website in Safari.

See… Obviously a mistake.

What the…

What itÕs supposed to do, I suspect, is to swap the main image with a lighter version of the same image when you roll your mouse over it. Instead, in Safari, it swaps the image, and then offsets it by about 100 pixels down and left, which results in part of the image repeating at the top and left. Looks really weird (as you can see in the pictures).

So, like a good citizen…

I figured, what the heck, even the best designers sometimes make technical mistakes. ItÕll just take a few seconds to email them. So I made a screenshot, attached it to an email with a brief explanation, and forgot about it.

The plot thickens

I got another email today from Quark. (They must want me to buy their product.) Again, nothing out of the ordinary. But I did notice one of their feature articles – Working with interactive Web elements: Rollovers. Huh, I thought to myself, I seem to remember seeing something about Quark and rollovers just the other day.

Now I actually have no idea if they used this technique to make the rollover on their home page. But, what surprises me is that they would draw attention to this flaw in their website, and then promote it as a feature of their product. I would imagine that Mac users make up a large part of their business. With Macs being the system of choice for designers, and Safari being the system of choice for Mac users, there is a high probability that a lot of people will see this problem. So it seems to me that theyÕre not inspiring a great deal of trust in their product among their core user group. Hopefully (for their sake) somebody there will read my email and take it seriously.

HereÕs the fundamental thing

I think this happens to most businesses at one time or another. They start acting like a big company. And when you’re big like that, you can’t always just respond to an immediate problem or issue. What makes companies like CampaignMonitor so different (aside from the fact that they really are a small company) is that they can respond quickly to problems with their product. Of course, even big companies can act small (IÕm thinking of Costco), but thatÕs a topic for another day.

IÕll be really interested to see what ultimately happens to Quark. Will they fix this niggling problem with their website, or will they waste away into oblivion and join the likes of Borland and Pan Am Airways.