Looks very nice on Firefox 3.5 ^

It's a bigger issue than you'd think. The purpose of the website is to save money by keeping people from picking up the phone. The company I work for caters to small business customers and 50% of our web customers are 1024x768 which means that a site like Delta catering to a more general population is probably higher than 50%.

When people non-saavy users (i.e. people who still run at 1024x768) get to a site and they have to scroll around to find things, they get confused and only bad things can happen. 1) They get frustrated and leave. 2) They call up and hound support agents. 3) They figure it out but get angry in the process.

I didn't know there was a no-flash option. I always used FF with NoScript to prevent the flash from loading, but invariably I had to click on a flash box to view flight status. The no-flash site is so much nicer and cleaner. Thanks for sharing that! I hope you don't get in too much trouble! :rolleyes:

i honestly don't care if i get in trouble for it. it has to be supported one way or another in case the flash fails to load. those that would rather skip it all together should have that option. i did post it about a yearish ago i think. :D

I agree, DeltaWebDev - I like it. A visible difference, but nothing so drastic that we don't know where/how to find stuff. Just a little polish on a freshly washed car.

+ Load times are faster
+ Bigger text for those of us with small resolutions
- As mentioned previously, some formatting issues with Chrome 2.0.172.33

Thanks for all you've done! Meeting all you folks at the ATL RWT/Do (even though we didn't meet you, we met Josh) made all this seem a little more real and personal to me. What you do ain't easy, and you won't please everyone, but know that for plenty of folks - you make a difference.

Here are some minor bugs I found using IE 8 and Win 7
Itin Bug
http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/2...ltabooboo1.png

Flight Updates Bug
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/1...ltabooboo2.png

Profile Bug
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/963/deltabooboo3.png

Also when accessing this page and many other pages on Delta
https://www.delta.com/traveling_chec...ewyork_jfk.jsp

You get a warning about some of the page not being secure, very annoying and some people may be afraid to go to that page after a warning like that.

You don't seem to have the images on the secure part of the server. Easy fix would be to force everyone to use the HTTPS and have all the images under the https folder or when I am logged in make sure links that do not require security do not have the HTTPS at the start of the URL.

Agree, the site (in XP SP3, running Firefox 3.5) seems snappier and the dropdown menus finally work correctly. Haven't had a chance to play with the site in detail but look forward to doing so over the next few days.

DeltaWebDev, thank you for proactively reaching out to, and being involved in, the FlyerTalk community. We do appreciate it.

Great, so customers will now be able to view the website without scrolling. But they will still find that when they search for a flight by price, Delta.com will give them only a few of the flights that are actually available instead of letting the customer choose which flight they would like to take. The customer can search by schedule, but then they won't be able to see the price until they go to purchase. The customer will also find an award search calendar that is totally and completely useless. But hey, at least they won't have to scroll around the useless pages.

While I appreciate the efforts being made, I just think Delta IT is placing lipstick on the pig and ignoring the fact that the bones of the website are broken.

Two features from NWA I reallly miss on DL: 1) Ability to check 'non-stop only' and 2) ability to check '+/- 3 days'.

I know that I can go in to the more detailed screen and specify # of days before/after which is handy, but being able to select +/- 3 days initially (which I do for 90% of my reservation searches) and have that as my default is very handy.

I wouldn't mind an option to specify noflash as default since I prefer that to flash.

I also strongly prefer seeing prices including taxes (as on NWA) vs not including taxes (DL)

Otherwise, much improved. Looks fairly good (other than previously mentioned) so far on FF v3.011 and v3.5.

Website <> booking engine.

Please don't beat up directly, or even indirectly, on the great Delta web developer people who have been so open and helpful here. And who ARE improving the website.

Do you really think that Charles Schwab's website is what executes the trades you enter through their website? Websites on huge legacy businesses (airlines, banks, brokerages) are the user interface/portal TO a much larger, usually much different system, often on old hardware and software (which does NOT mean "bad" nor obsolete). The Citibank website that shows you your bank account balance and lets you make payments is NOT the Citi system where the balance is actually maintained nor where the payments are actually processed.

Unless Citi is even stupider than their recent management shows...:rolleyes:

Don't blame Delta's helpful web developer FTers for the features or lack thereof of Delta's booking engine, or Deltamatic, or the nwa.com vs. delta.com decision or the Deltamatic vs. PARS decision. It's not their fault, it's not under their control if DL IT has any kind of rational structure.

Delta is rolling out an upgrade to their WEBSITE, not to their whole infrastructure. DeltaWebDev is here helping high-value customers learn about it and give feedback. I thank him for that.

(No I don't work for, never worked for, and have no stake in any of the companies I mentioned above - but I have worked and do work for companies on that scale with web-to-legacy-backend architectures).

The 508 is a little better, but there are still "Go" buttons here and there which I think are non-obvious, in particular when they float between things. Better to name them something other than Go for the non-CSS view of the page.

The flash is still there, but we'll have to agree to disagree about JS equivalents.

Ajax is a nice touch. IIRC you guys are a Tibco shop, so it makes sense to make the web page more tolerant about when the data returns. I'm hoping the AJAX will give you a good foundation to add some of the expanded search features NW has. Not sure about the 508 ramifications for AJAX.

I noticed in the beginning of the thread there was some talk from WebDev about files not making it to the servers. I can't stress enough about always enhancing build/promotion automation. Management hates putting money towards those types of projects because it's hard to prove tangible results, but I really believe it's a matter paying a penny now or a pound later.

+1

But that's another thing not typically under the developers' control.

It's still broken for me. Looks like it sends an incorrect redirect for some clients. Here is a sample HTTP session:

GET /?noFlash HTTP/1.1
Host: delta.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Delta Airlines
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:39:29 GMT
Content-length: 0
Set-Cookie: TLTHID=6DB9E9EC70B61070D1CAF31ED69087B8; Path=/
Set-Cookie: TLTSID=6DB9E9EC70B61070D1CAF31ED69087B8; Path=/
X-powered-by: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.0.5.GA (build: CVSTag=Branch_4_0 date=200610162339)/Tomcat-5.5
Location: http://www.delta.com/index.jsp?noFlash&noFlash=?noFlash
Set-cookie: mobile=N; Expires=Tue, 21-Jul-2009 20:39:29 GMT; Path=/


I didn't bother with a second level of recursion; you can see the problem here.

Thanks for looking into this! Not a dealbreaker for me of course but I like my tabbed browsing.

My comments here are not directed at DeltaWebDev the individual. My comments on here are feedback to the experience of using Delta.com. I understand there are different systems involved, but they have to be connected at some point. I appreciate the efforts DeltaWebDev puts forth in making the "website" look better, but if I can still not do what the purpose of the website is for, who cares if it looks nice or not. As with many other aspects of Delta, they place an emphasis on the outer picture hoping that people will ignore the inner workings that are broken. I understand DeltaWebDev is only doing as told.

When searching by price:

Delta.com shows added taxes/fees, and resulting total, when selecting each leg.

nwa.com shows pre-tax price and total price when selecting an itinerary.

I fail to see the practical difference in these approaches.