lhk

A good one.

Look for an unclosed div.

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 ;-)))

Hi Otto,

I haven’t been delving too deeply into those reports, as PDFs load too slowly for me (sic!). ??

However, I never trust statistics I haven’t forged myself, so to speak ;-). I have quite a few differing news regarding the USA, e.g. the fact that quite a few areas outside of urban regions already have trouble getting a payable phone line, not to speak of DSL or cable, that connectivity prices in rural areas have been lately sharply rising, etc etc.

According to our local statistics I should have the choice between at least 3-4 DSL carriers, my region is even listed as “DSL-enabled”, but the plain simple fact is that there aren’t even the distribution mechanics installed here. Still according to statistics my region has DSL… ?? So you see why I tend to distrust such stats when I often hear completely different tales.

As to web-designers and catering to dialup: 4 years doesn’t even touch it, especially when we are talking professional, and even more so, when we are talking commercial design.

Unless we talk about sites which are seclusive and exclusive to their immediate surroundings and a very narrow clientele, web designers have to cater to many necessities, dialup by the way being in my eyes even more important than accessibility of impaired people in this respect as it touches much more people. If you look at any well-designed, successful commercial site, you will notice that the real pros indeed do cater to analog users. Carefully so. These can bring in the exact same revenue as a broadband user.

Privateers will have to ask themselves for whom they design and whether they can or want to afford to exclude large portions of potential users on the WWW (which doesn’t consist of only the USA either).

Hi Otto,

what I said – 50/50 isn’t “negligable” as glowlite assumed. And the USA is the farthest along regarding broadband.

The more interesting statistic data isn’t apparently available? How large the percentage of non-urban (= outside the bigger cities) broadband users is. Because sure as hell, these users will wait for a long while before they get anything better.

Hi glowlite,

…Dialup users are also dwindling quite rapidly…

Wrong. Patently wrong.

Dialup is standard for practically everyone too far outside of large towns to have access to a lot of phone/internet companies in a lot of competition. This is so even in the US American countryside. It is even more so the case for most of Europe, most of Africa and Asia.

One might get the impression of something dwindling, if one lives in an at least medium-sized city well connected to all backbones and with a good infrastructure, as one’s own friends tend to come from the same area and it’s their responses by which people tend to form opinions on.

E.g. I live a mere 50 miles away from a huge city in Europe, in which I worked and lived but a couple of years ago. Most of my friends are from that city and to them broadband access, flatrates and a large number of choices are “normal”. When they visit me where I now live and notice the modem I still have, their eyes bulge. Even more so when I tell them, that we have no broadband here, nor radio/wire-LAN access points and that I pay quite dearly per minute for online access.

So, as long as you want people outside the larger western culture cities to access sites you design for, you better stop thinking everyone has a 19″ screen and DSL access.

And yep, I noticed lately a lot of sites which cater exclusively to broadband speeds. I click out of them the moment I notice their huge overhead with file sizes.

Hi,

given the late comment spam attack on the net I set several gallery scripts behind a .htaccess password and installed a “public access”-page, on which a gif renders the needed user and PW details to enter the galleries.

This way comment spam has stopped completely on these scripts, however, real persons still can enter normally and can leave their comments even if not registered.

This could also be implemented on the blog, thus opening access to a wider public of “real-person-users”.

As to the pinging/technorati settings, I always thought that it is a very bad idea to automatically install this enabled. I’d really suggest WP devs to disable this on standard install in the future. Those who want this can enable, but noob users who don’t don’t have it and get washed with stuff from the start.

Good article! ??

Hi,

yes, trackback and comment spam CAN hit the server, especially when – like in the past days – you get batterings of 10,000 spams in a few hours.

…and don’t forget to give those a NO-widgets option who quite plainly consider them needless surplus ??

Hi,

I create for a variety of audiences. Especially when a site is read a lot in the former Eastern block, 800 x 600 still is an issue.

Also, even I still use a 15″ screen, just bought a new one at that, conceded with a 1024 x 768 solution, but anything larger than the 15″ is mighty uncomfy with my workplace situation. So, don’t assume that even all pros will be on 17″ or 19″ screens. There is a decided “end” to what is possible for people not working in architectonically configurable offices.

That said, either I try to go for a fluid design, or I really look hard and long at the server stats. Often I offer a switching possibility, so that those who want to accommodate a lower solution have the chance to switch the theme to one geared to that screen width. As this is usually a “standard plugin” with many if not all blog and CMS softwares, I see no problem in the topic. I just offer the possibility to accommodate and well is well.

Hi,

colors can always be adjusted. I’d look for a theme with the relevant properties and then change the colors to my liking, if I were you.

Take a peek at Laila 2.0 (orangescale.com) which has what you ask for.

Hi LiverpoolLad,

yes, that table is used for displaying pedigree data, and it just looks horrid to have a fine 1px border around the image displaying the animal and the thickish “normal” border of an unstyled table below that.

And nope – as far as I was able to find out it’s not the shortened color, it’s a problem in how IE and FF treat the “border-collapse: collapse” property. It drove me nuts this morning, as this seems to be a bug in some variants of FF/Mozilla and not in others.

The above solution however now works in all relatively recent versions of IE and FF/Mozilla. Funny that for once it’s FF which has the bug (and not IE) ;-), but a bug it is/was.

Hi,

the solution (works in IE and in FF at least):

#ptable {
border-top: 1px solid #000000;
border-right: 1px none #000000;
border-bottom: 1px none #000000;
border-left: 1px solid #000000;
}

#ptable td {
border-top: 1px none #000000;
border-right: 1px solid #000000;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000000;
border-left: 1px none #000000;
font: 10px Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
}

“ptable” is by the way the ID of the table.

Hi again,

ok, this seems to be a Firefox-Bug with border-collapse.

Anyone have an idea how I can CSS-style the border-width of a table to (an exact) 1px without using border-collapse?