[Web4lib] Nielsen's Top 10 - 2005 version

[Thomas Dowling]

Leo Robert Klein wrote:
> ...If you think the
> vast majority of your users have monitors set at 1600x1200 and love
> resizing their windows to get the text right, then you'll design your
> site with them in mind.

Thanks for digging that strawman up.  The problem is not that sites are
designing to one size and it's the wrong one.  The problem is that they
developed bad design habits during a period of substantial homogeneity
in user displays, and that homogeneity is breaking apart.

A couple of years ago, you could hard code your site for 800-px wide
screens and slightly narrower windows (how many designers just started
every page with <table width=764>?). It looked just right for your
800/full screen users, you could be satisfied that it was good enough
for your 1024 users, and the remaining few percent could just deal with
how it looked.  Just like with IE-only pages.

The current situation is not that the overall size of displays has
grown, but that the difference has grown between the largest and
smallest sizes your users are likely to have.  "Big" is no longer 30%
larger than "small" - it's now 100% larger or more.  No single size is
going to fit as many people today as 800 did a few years ago.  So you
can either hard code to a size that annoys a growing number of your
users, or stop coding to any particular size.



-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu