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

Paola Kathuria paola at limitless.co.uk
Wed Jul 11 21:37:03 CDT 2001


Keith wrote:
> Take two designs, (1) works on all browsers and
> closes sales on 5% of all visitors - (2) works on only 4+ browsers
> and closes sales on 10% of all visitors. I'd really like the portfolio of
> any of you that think your design (1) is superior.

I agree, the 10% sales design is better than the 5% design but
I find it impossible to imagine two sites that will perform in
this way.  The first site would have to be badly designed or
unusable to perform worse.  Since I know that "working on all
browsers" doesn't also mean bad design and hard to use, your
example therefore seems to be a straw man.

Brian King said:
> Most customers aren't going to pay for duel functionality
> coding on their sites either.

Probably, but I don't understand why this is necessary anymore.
There seems to me to be a myth that an accessible
(backwardly-compatible) site has to be a site that is dull, just
text, no design and no interactivity.  I have wondered whether
the (sorry...) crappy web sites of various usability "gurus"
has created this myth.

Instead, visual design, usability, accessibility are all
completely and utterly independent of each other: you can
have a visually stunning and usable site that relies entirely
on Flash and therefore inaccessible to many visitors, or an
accessible site with great content but poor navigation and
crappy design (e.g., www.useit.com).

I think that all three attributes (taken with good content)
are needed to make a "great" site.  evolt.org approaches
what I think is a great web site, for instance (I'd accompany
the main text links with colour-coded icon images - et viola!
functional eye-candy).

Most sites probably aren't e-commerce but I would say that
the purpose of most sites is to display text (which is
sometimes accompanied by images).  Basic HTML does text
and images very well (without the use of JavaScript, Java
or any plug-in).

Since site navigation can be implemented in a combination
of text, colour and graphics, I think that relying on any
aspect of the visitor's browser to display text or to
implement a site's navigation can only *reduce* the number
of visitors and therefore the resulting sales.

My approach has been to work with professional designers
on the visual design but to implement as much of the site
content and all of the site navigation in in HTML, even
it's generated at the server to create interactivity or to
maintain state.  (On sites without back-end databases or
software, this often meant that 80% of the site cost went
to the graphic design company we worked with.)

I then look to see what functionality or features are left
and consider alternative stable technologies to implement
them in.  99.9% of the time, there's nothing left over to
implement (and this is on sites with 5- or 6-figure budgets).

Anyway, for the past few years, I've wished there was a
respected review/awards site which acknowledged these
attributes equally (content, design, usability and
accessibility).  Too many official awards focus on visual
design.

I think that Evolt is the perfect forum to host such a
review mechanism or awards system.  Hopefully someone will
read this far down to see the suggestion! (It's something
I've been thinking about for a while and so I can put my
vision of it in writing if anyone's interested.)


Paola
--
black and purple at http://www.limitless.co.uk/~paola/




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