[Web4lib] Nielsen's Top 10 - 2005 version

[Eric Hellman]

I think that before you start citing salon, yahoo and sun as 
exemplary sites (good or bad), you should first of all characterize 
them accurately.

Salon is NOT a fixed width site- it widens if you make your window 
wider. true, the 4 columns require a rather large minimum width, 
but...

www.Yahoo.com scales its width based on your font size- pretty cool- 
it appears to be a fixed number of characters wide. It's much more 
advanced than your typical site that codes for a fixed screen width. 
my.yahoo.com is a fully flowing, non-fixed width site.

www.sun.com is a good example of a fixed width site, but go look at 
java.sun.com or sunsolve.sun.com, which are customer focused. It 
seems the sales and marketing people at sun believe in fixed width 
and the support and software people at sun believe in flowing 
layouts. Pick the organization to emulate that you think is most 
similar to your organization.




At 2:15 PM -0500 10/21/05, Leo Robert Klein wrote:
>Thomas Dowling wrote:
>>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.
>>
>
>If some pretty major sites are designing -- evidently -- to a 
>standard screen, I'd hardly call it "digging up a strawman".  It's 
>important after all to bring our deliberations back down to earth 
>every once and a while.
>
>Furthermore, I'm delighted to find out that we actually had an 
>earlier simpler era where we could assume a "homogeniety" of 
>displays.  As I recall, the argument against fixed-width displays 
>back then was that they weren't compatible with WebTV and WAP and 
>WML (talk about strawmen).
>
>In any case, it's really hard for me to imagine -- in fact, it's 
>beyond belief -- that sites as varied as Yahoo, Salon and Sun 
>Microsystems are in the business of developing sites that annoy a 
>"growing number" of their users. Gone are the days when you could 
>launch a site based on the ideology of one or two developers.  So 
>maybe they're on to something.
>
>LEO

-- 

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric at openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
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