[thelist] Old Browsers old Software, cut bait and move on.

[Brian King]

Well said.  My point exactly.  You have to cater to the target audience.  If
marketing says that without the glitz their audience is reduced by 50% and
conversely without X Browser support their audience is reduced by 25%, I am
not going to take responsibility for the decision.  Just make the options
known.

>What you're doing is exactly the reason I'm part of evolt and exactly the
>reason I'm *very* proud of evolt.org's site.

My sincerest apologies.  I never meant to insult anyone at Evolt.  I
obviously use Evolt as a resource of mine and do so because of the 'clean'
content that is there.

Brian W. King

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On
Behalf Of Warden, Matt
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 10:22 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] Old Browsers old Software, cut bait and move on.

> From: "Brian King" <BKing at Impact-Technologies.com>
> Subject: RE: [thelist] Old Browsers old Software, cut bait and move on.
>
> >Anyway, I agree with aardvark that it's easy enough to code for all
> browsers
> >without having to use separate code. On our site we have perhaps 2 or 3
> tiny
> >workarounds, the rest works in pretty much any browser I've tested it
with.
>
> You're displaying text and a few jpgs/gifs.  I hope you didn't have to
write
> too many work-arounds

Some of the less-intelligent of us (including me, I suppose) would think
this is what the web is supposed to be.

What you're doing is exactly the reason I'm part of evolt and exactly the
reason I'm *very* proud of evolt.org's site.

Maybe it's not the users who need educating. Could it be your clients? Isn't
that your job? They aren't the web experts, you are. While it's unrealistic
to think you'll convince them to get rid of all the flash and dhtml and
pop-up windows and font tags and ..., you'll surely knock *some* sense into
them.

Eye candy is much like a shocking commercial. The viewer will notice it the
first time they see it, but will more or less ignore it when he/she sees it
times after that. If your site is 80% eye candy, why would any user ever
return to your site?

All of your arguments thus far have been based on either (a) pushing users
where you want them to be, or (b) decisions you can make because of the
target audience to which *YOU* develop. You're doing what A List Apart has
done. But, just like A List Apart, not everyone can do that. Not everyone
has target audiences like you do and like ALA does. You're making faulty
generalizations based upon your specific situation.

Similarly, evolt.org doesn't need to be flashy. So, why block out some
users? I mean, maybe we would be blocking out 3% if we added some "glitz",
but we don't need glitz. We're a content site. We need content. People don't
come back to evolt.org do gawk at its stylesheet and page structure. They
come for content. That's our target audience... people who like content. So,
we focus on that and don't add glitz that would only distract from what our
users want to see.



--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com


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