Do we really care about 800×600 people?

Hi again,

Otto: no, I don’t use amazon.com (neither the US, nor the local version), we have a couple of extremely good antiquarian trade sites in Europe, which are a whole lot less expensive and just as well sorted.

But the New York Times is just as bad, one reason why I recently cancelled my subscription (btw telling them why so, too). Their loss, quite practically.

It’s a signal of decided non-professionalism to exclude potential customers from a commercial site, especially one geared to/enabled for global sales (and a majority of them are, whether they consciously think so or not, they usually notice however only when the sales go down, which is too late).

The way to do it can be seen here:

https://www.bmw.com/com/en/index.html

And another such good example:

https://www.jkrowling.com/

And I take on any bet of any size, that both these guys know precisely why they do what they do ??

The point I’m making, and it’s the same whether we talk screen solution, accessibility or size, is that a pro for a commercial and pro site can’t afford to cut off clientele. As there is absolutely no need to do that anyway (see examples above) the only possible explanation can be laziness or a totally faulty idea of one’s own magnitude ;-).

If you instituted such warped ideas to real life, you would build 10 storey warehouses without lifts or escalators, or you’d allow only English-speakers into bookshops which offer books in several hundred languages.

A while ago I had an interesting smalltalk with the owner of one of the most renowned Mercedes (Daimler-Benz) outlets in my country. When he was younger and just one of the salespeople in the sales area, he’d let the make of the car go to his head. A man in rough working clothes entered the sales rooms and wanted to test drive the current S-class. He did one stiff upper lip survey of that guy and told him that “unfortunately no S-classes were currently free for testing”. The guy left his premises and walked across the street, where – among other luxury car makes – there was a Jaguar seller. Later that day he went to the local chill-out of the car salesmen in this area and happened to overhear one of the Jag salesmen regal the rest of them with the story of a guy in shabby workclothes walking in, test-driving the most expensive and best-equipped model they had on stock and plunking the price in cash on the counter. It turned out that this man just had
inherited a fortune and done what he’d always dreamed of doing: going in his everyday clothes into a luxury carshop to buy the best model the shop had available and pay in cash. As the Mercedes salesman earned partly on commission, as they usually did at the time, he said that this felt like a real mean kick into his marbles. Ever since then he never again took appearance or equipment or seeming intelligence/capacity of someone as a guide for “worthiness”. And he’s up to the day sure of the fact that it was this change of attitude which earned him the position he finally achieved. His sales were always better than those of the others.

Many of the arguments here remind me very much of this story ;-)))

Personally, I always try really, really hard to convince clients that fluid is the only sensible way to go. The big problem with any fixed design is that you’re making the assumption the user will size their window to accomodate your design.

What makes you think that just because the user has a monitor set to 1024×768 that their browser window size is actually 1024×768? Personally, I never have any windows at “full screen” and I hate using websites which make me have to resize my window just to accomodate their inflexible design.

The “JK Rowling official site” in particular, is a good example of deliberately designing for someone else, other than the users:

I goto the URL and it presents me with a doorway page saying “enter accessibility enabled version”, which when clicked opens a new window, maximised for my convenience presumably, which proceeds to play a flash clip. That’s putting a different spin of the phrase “accessibility enabled”, isn’t it? That website does exactly the oppostite of what I would expect the phrase to mean.

Hi pizdin_dim,

you’re right, I just saw they are currently re-designing, last time I visited both text-only and accessibility enabled worked just nicely, now only text-only seems to be correctly linked. That worked better a while ago, even including the mystery gimmick for the kids.

And again yes, your comment on maximally opened windows also is quite correct, though I by now have gotten pretty used to FF tabs.

when I went to the jk rowling site, it said I need to enable popups in order to view the site. well, like hell I am. I closed it.

Pop-ups is hell for Internet users:(

Back to topic:
In my opinion its a matter of your visitors. My advise is to use a stat program and look at the hardware stats. “Browser stats is less important, because your site should look good in al browser. I now use also Amaya. Its a w3c browser and this one will show you al the errors in your files. In combination with a program like Dreamweaver, you can fix them.”(but I dont care about al errors)

But my site visitors only less then 3 % use 800×600. So its best resolution is 1024×768. Anyway, the sidebar is moving under the postcontent when people view it with less.
So it totaly is up to your stats what you should do.

“But my site visitors only less then 3 % use 800×600. So its best resolution is 1024×768.”

So, are you saying that you’re one of those designers who assumes that just because most of your visitors use 1024×768 that they have their windows maximized? If so, you’re forcing those who don’t (like me) to maximize their windows just to see your site.

That can’t be good from an accessibility and usability point of view, can it?

“And again yes, your comment on maximally opened windows also is quite correct, though I by now have gotten pretty used to FF tabs.”

Are you saying that the “JK Rowling” site opens the window in a new tab for you, in FF?

I have my FF configured to open links from other applications in a new tab in the most recent window and to force links that open new windows to open in a new tab and I still get a new instance of FF launched.

Hi pizdin_dim,

nope, I was saying that I lately have grown accustomed to not open several windows, instead I open them in FF tabs, to spare me the clutter on my screen ??

I wasn’t talking about the jkrowling site, which – as I said – unfortunately seems to have been incompletely updated. It worked just nicely a while ago. However, nothing in this recent state of that site actually does negate my prior comment, that it is dead easy and absolutely no problem for a competent and conscientuous webmaster to create sites (then take the BMW one as a sample, that one worked yesterday just nicely) which do not shear off customers/visitors.

I fail to see the problem entirely many seem to create out of this here, especially with a CMS like WP.

We have a themeswitcher/CSS-switcher plugin for WP, it works (I have lately installed it several times) and with this it is absolutely NO problem to offer visitors a 800×600 version or a low-bandwidth version of a site. It just takes a bit of added work. It also is absolutely NO problem to ensure that files offered will not disable people on a dialup line. In most cases it just is ceasing to auto-load anything and allow people to themselves click on a textlink. There is no logical reason to force auto-loading files on people, if they are interested they will look at them, if not, they will not do that. If you force them, they click out of the site. It’s that simple in real life ??

So the actual question rising (for me) in this here discussion is: just how competent and worth their money are people who argument that it’s quite ok to shear off users who are in the minority but still could be very much interested in the product offered (be it reading of a blog or buying something from a commercial site). And from that rises the next question of why – if there is an easy alternate solution – these people do not do what their job is? …

@ pizdin_dim,

“Anyway, the sidebar is moving under the postcontent when people view it with less.”

I’m not forcing anyone to anything.
When screen resolution is less then 1024X768 the sidebar moves down under the post content. I only have 2 recent logs on the front, so it should be verry easy for people like you to scroll just a little.

When you have your screen not max, the same happens. When you have a 1280X up like me, and your window is not max, its very easy as wel.

I don’t mean to sound hostile, I know people can sound hostile on forums when really they don’t mean to, but some users are really funny when it comes to things like sidebars moving, etc. It makes them think they’ve broken the website.

Seriously, even stuff like setting the background image to fixed, rather than scroll!

Generally, a good approach is to keep the sidebar a fixed width, and have the content squish as you change the size of the window, people are used to that. Big web companies like Google do it:

https://www.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=465&topic=352

so people are used to it.

But, at the end of your day, it depends on your site’s content and your users. If it’s a general purpose blog, then it’s best to make things as easy as possible, but if it’s aimed at more technical users, you don’t need to dumb down as much ??

I ran a local news website but we had a fair bit of international visits.

Given the trouble in the world, I hope that one thing WordPress can do, is enable people to communicate and understand different cultures. I do not mean this in a patronising manner.

Most of the poor, will not be hooking up a 19″ lcd for a while yet.

One very important point some of you miss is that even with a 1024 screen resolution, if the sidebar with the history or favorites and so on is open (mine always is) then the 1024 screen is more like a 900.

Therefore, using a fixed 800 width, or a 760 upwards, you know the 1024’ers are ok. Maybe the 800’s might have to sidescroll, but for most people that means losing the left hand sidebar on the website, and its why I think the left hand navigation is best, for Western readers. The Arabic people of course, read from left to right.

Fixed width or fluid, there is always a pro and a minus.

The people with big screens should be grateful for a nice 760 width website. Anyone can read the content if the text is in ems or percentages. You can always have a couple of websites open on a big screen, thats why bigger screens were built, so that you can use more windows for the main part.

I know a lot of “old” people who need 800×600 in order to read posts as higher resolutions show letters and fonts smaller. I know that there are a lot of gen-xes in the web but time passes and their time will come when they too will be asking for bigger fonts. Moreover, not everyone has 19″ or bigger screens. I have seen people struggling to read web sites with fonts sooo small that you would need a magnifying glass to read it (this coming from somebody with a 20/20 vision), just because the web designer though they were cool, gues what, it is your users and customers the ones that should decide what is/is not cool…..

I’ve not read through all 44 of the previous posts, however, I finally had to weigh in.

My current theme was thought up with low resolution users in mind.

I’m 3 days into a building a new theme (hopefully up by the middle of June) and it uses fixed width divs, maxxing out at @ 850px. I knew going in that a small amount of horizontal scroll was going to be had for those still at 800×600 and I’ve also looked at it myself to see “just how much” there would be.

Honestly, I am simply not going to sweat it.

—

A couple related remarks and/or observations:

Small fonts sizes: Often times, sites end up with too small of font size because they are attempting to accomodate lower res. users, while still shoving as much onto the page as they can. Look at most of the 3 column themes.. a good deal of them have nearly unreadable text in the 2 smaller columns.. themes with more than 3 columns — honestly, Ive yet to find one that balances space and content correctly.

A better “solution” for me would be to not use that sort of template, OR trim down on the content, OR increase your page resolution.

As for left hand/right hand navigation menus, I see the ‘feasability” in using a left-sided one, but I dunno.. we, collectively, cater to the highest denominator I guess in that regard. Most people, regardless, are right-handed, and mouse movements are minimized with a right-sided siebar.

I do believe that was the original theory behind those. I might be mistaken though.

Actually, everyone loves bigger fonts. Jakob Nielsen, usability expert and scourge of unworkable crap everywhere, did a study which showed that teenagers avoid sites with tiny fonts like the plague.

And think about it, tiny fonts may look nice, but if they’re unreadable, people hate it! I know I certainly do, I am forever resizing fonts so I can at least see what the text says!