Rapid Intake: Where are the standards?
Today Rapid Intake announced a new service named Unison.
Not having used the service, I won’t pretend to know whether it’s a worthwhile service or not. It’s certainly an intriguing idea, and with its oft-mentioned low price, it’s guaranteed to get some industry buzz.
Out of curiosity, I perused the Rapid Intake site to read more about Unison. I wasn’t very impressed with the Unison product webpage. Being the geek I am, I decided to take a peek at the Unison page’s source code. UGH! They’re using tables for layout, JavaScript for simple navigation menu mouseovers, are omitting alt tags on many images, are using non-web-safe fonts, and are positively abusing CSS styles by applying a class called “maintext” to almost every paragraph.
Here’s a snippet:
<tr> <td height="310" valign="top" class="h1"> <p class="h1">Collaborative eLearning Development and Review for Teams</p> <p class="h1"> </p> <p class="mainText">Built on the Rapid Intake eLearning Development Platform, Unison is a web-based solution [ ... ]</p> <p class="mainText"> </p> <p class="mainText">Now all your SMEs, designers, and reviewers can work together on e-learning courseware [ ... ]</p> <p class="mainText"> </p> <p class="mainText">All you need to do is <a href="#">logon and get started.</a> </p> <p class="mainText"> </p>
This code clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of long-established web standards and best practices.
I certainly don’t mean to beat up on whoever designed their site, but as a company whose business is publishing web-based documents, this website gives me zero confidence in the quality of their product.
Please understand that I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I wouldn’t rag on an individual person’s site or home-brewed course system (I know my site isn’t perfect, either!). It’s just that this site is a perfect example of how our industry appears to pay little heed to web standards and best practices. Rapid Intake — a company clearly on the rise in our niche market — is in a perfect position to be a role model for ‘doing it right.’
Standards make development work easier, and greatly reduce compatibility issues. I just don’t understand why companies like Rapid Intake don’t see that.
What others are saying... (3 comments so far) You can follow all responses to this entry through this post's comments feed (RSS).
It’s not just you, Philip. I rarely look at a tool if the site is poorly designed and poorly constructed.
I think if you’re advertising a tool to help me do my web development and your site is constructed like crap — I think a healthy dose of skepticism is well-deserved.
Philip,
First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to visit Rapid Intake’s website and review the marketing side of our site under the hood. I also would like to say that I understand where you are coming from. It’s kind of like seeing a hair stylist with bad hair. Would you really like to get your hair cut from them?
That said, I’d like to explain why when you look under the hood of the website, it’s a little raw.
We’ve been focusing on making a great product, not a standards-based website. (Please note I’m differentiating here between our SaaS product Unison and the website that promotes it). I don’t like seeing poorly designed sites anymore than you do. We’re a startup and with limited resources, it became a resource allocation question.
Given the timeframe we put ourselves through, we decided to pour most of our effort into the product itself (not to say that even that is completely bug free) and make our site functional. We ended up having some miscalculations on resource loading and had to develop the website extremely quickly to get ready for launch.
Our product launch in Atlanta was at an industry conference (Training 2008 Conf and Expo) Feb 4 and 5. It went really well over the last two days and we couldn’t have had a better launch. But a commitment to launch at a conference like that is not the kind of deadline you can push back. Consequently, when we ran into late website construction issues (I won’t go into the details about what those issues were), we decided to pull the site together very quickly with Dreamweaver. When you’re pulling 100 hour weeks to launch what could be a break-through product, you have to choose your battles, and we poured everything we could into the product and chose to skimp on the elegance of the website (of course that doesn’t mean our product is perfect either, but we demoed it to many industry participants the last two days and they say we are really hitting the mark).
Given that, I certainly hope we can go back and clean up these kinds of issues you’ve raised, and I don’t mind you raising them. It’s a fair critique.
Best regards,
Garin Hess
CEO
Rapid Intake
P.S. I’d like to invite you to a personal demo of Unison, if you’d like. I’d be interested in getting your feedback on it. If you’re interested, shoot me an email.
Also, I’d like to invite any of your readers to take Unison for a test drive. I’d love to hear what you and they like about it, and what you would improve. We’re all about continuous improvement and would take your readers’ comments seriously. We know we haven’t created a perfect product, but we believe it’s a very good one that fits a real need. So visit http://www.rapidintake.com and check it out, and let us know what you think.
@Garin
Thanks for the comment. I certainly understand your situation and can sympathize with trying to handle the logistics of such a big product launch.
I’ve actually heard good things about your new product Unison, and I know a bunch of my peers use your FlashForm product. I think your company has a very bright future in our field, which is one of the main reasons I decided to write my post.
If you’ve perused any of my other posts (I don’t blame you if you haven’t!), you’ll see that one of my primary personal goals is to raise awareness of web standards and to try and get our industry to do a better job of adhering to these standards. It’s amazing how much traditional website development has evolved over the last five years (CSS, XHTML, accessibility, cleaner JavaScript, etc.), and how poorly e-learning courseware has kept up with it.
I feel this is probably due to two things:
1. the fact that the e-learning field is full of ‘developers’ who are lacking solid web development technical skills, and
2. companies who sell e-learning development tools with the promise of easy-to-build, standards-conformant courses, yet don’t actually adhere to any standards beyond simple SCORM conformance or the like.
Your company is in a prime position to be a leader in the courseware development tool market, which is why I was shocked to see how poorly the Unison product website had been done. While I understand that the product website and the product itself are two completely different things, with different development teams, it’s hard to separate the quality of a product’s website with the product itself. Apple certainly wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for their obsessive attention to design standards in all aspects of their products and marketing.
I apologize if I sound like I’m standing on a soapbox, I certainly don’t want to come across that way. As I said, I think your company has a bright future, and I think Unison will be a very exciting product for many people! I just hope that as your company grows, you’ll be able to devote more attention and resources to standards. In the end, this makes course development easier for everyone, makes courses as cross-browser and cross-platform as possible, and would make for a great marketing angle, too.
Best of luck!
- philip
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