Yesterday I reported that NLM redesigned their website and I mentioned that I kind of liked the design. Today people on MEDLIB-L are reporting problems viewing the site. The biggest complaint (and a valid one) is that they see blue links on a blue background. What they should see is this image as displayed on the Technical Bulletin, instead they see this which is clearly difficult to read.
Is this a browser issue? I would think it is. The people who are reporting this problem seem to have IE 7 or lower. I have IE 8 and all of my computers are IE 8 so I really can’t confirm whether it is browser incompatibility issue. I have Firefox and the site does well on Firefox. However as one person pointed out on MEDLIB-Lthis could also be a style sheet loading problem, they recommend going into Tools and changing the check box for formatting documents using my style sheet.
As I said I don’t have IE 7 on any of my computers, so I cannot verify if this is a fix or not.
What perplexes me slightly is why NLM would design a site that is not very compatible with IE 7?
UPDATE: I logged into my email on 1/13/11 and there was a post on MEDLIB-L from a person at NLM. According to the email, they are actively investigating the problem. Prior to the launch they did test the site on IE 6,7,8, and 9 beta as well as Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. They did not see any issues prior to the release. However, there are some IE 7 users who are seeing this problem.
They want your help identifying the cause. If your home page looks very different from the image at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/nlmhomepage_2011.png contact them at customer service email or their contact page http://apps.nlm.nih.gov/mainweb/siebel/nlm/index.cfm.
Please give a detailed description of your IE version and operating system.