Nikoport

While being confronted with a question a couple of days ago, if the 800×600 resolution is still matter for the web design, my first reaction was to say that even if it matters, then not much, but after remembering seeing some statistics from some portuguese sites, i have remembered. So i have checked just statistics for 5 different sites with a different audiences, to see if the 800×600 resolution still matters. The results were a kind of surprising for me.

But first of all, a good site should have a liquid design, this way it should display in 800×600, more or less in the same way as in other higher resolutions. I am still trying to convince the designer with whom i am working on websites to start moving into making flexible designs, and the next project i am finishing at the moment is quite a step from the previous experiences. =O)

But back to the resolution statistics - in a specific theme site (geology), having more than 90% of the visitors portuguese - the percentage of users having a screen resolution of 800×600 was 10.59%, in a general shopping site the percentage was 8.54%, a site connected with the children had 8.47%, some web design site - 1.82%, this site on the contrary to the others i have compared has only 2.85%, but the most users visiting my site are not from the Portugal =O)
And if you still think that such numbers as 8% or 10% are not really important, then the fact of not ignoring the Macintosh users, which is more or less accepted across web community, seems to be ridiculous, because for the general statistics Os X users do not represent more then 1% in Portugal.

After seeing that numbers i decided to check on the statistics from other sources, so this what i have found about the users using 800×600 resolutions:

• W3Schools - 14%
• Digital Web - 28% (January 2006)
• tamingthebeast - 10.88%
• Upsdell - 12%
• Jakob Nielsen - 17%
• Game Producer - 2.57%

In short - in Portugal it is still matters, to test sites for this resolution. As for the web in general - i believe that the answer is pretty much the same, there are many users, who are still bound to the 800×600 resolution, and we have no right of ignoring them, or at least we should try to pay attention. =O)

=O)
I would even add, then when in General the 800×600 resolution statistics will drop below the percentage of the Macintosh users, then it will be the time to consider of ignoring it.
=O)
On a more serious note, the phone, palm and smart devices with browsers are becoming more and more common, thats why we should pay more and more attention to them, and they are so far from that “miserable” 800×600 resolution, so i think there is no way we will ignore this resolution in the next couple of years.

Today, I have finished implementing some updates and a new online shop for Chama Talento and it should go live on Monday afternoon GMT, if everything is alright and no serious bugs will be found during the weekend testing. =O)

There are a lot of changes introduction of the “running news” and the flash news on the main page, privacy policy area, and the most important one is at the shop: the product hierarchy - from having only categories and products, the shop is now having much more complicated one: categories -> subcategories -> products -> versions. Besides that, each product version will have a lot of different options to choose: color, width, size or material for example. Chama Talento is surely becoming one of the finest shoes shops in Lisbon(Portugal) area.

Some of the other introduced changes are: inclusion of 7 subcategories (Dance shoes, Flamenco, Dance-Hall shoes, etc) with a more detailed shop products description and a lot of images. This site is getting better with each update, but still i am thinking about a lot of usability and accessibility changes which should be done, if the client would agree. Maybe with the next update some of them will find a way into the Chama Talento site.

Spend 10 minutes of your precious time and take a web design survey at the “A List Apart” page, which is just 37 questions, and the most of them are multiple choice. After that, we will hopefully get to see, what kind of people are working all around the web. This might give a slightly idea, about the professionals working on and perfecting the same goal.

There are currently several prizes, all to be won by random participants: a ticket to “An Event Apart”, an IPod or a funky “A List Apart” T-shirt, for example. Thus survey will remain open until 22 May, 2007, so do not waste any time, participate and invite people you know.

After 4 months of working and reworking and once again changing and altering, the Interconfor lda website is online. Interconfor is a private Portuguese firm, working in industry of furniture and construction components, which it provides for a very wide scope of different commercial firms. They help construction firms to develop custom furniture and equipment solutions for all types of apartments, and recently they have even started doing post-forming on the furniture components, which allow them to provide exclusive solutions in Portugal.

This Interconfor web site was created using XHTML 1.0 strict DTD and CSS 2.1 profile, the design has some nonlinear things, which i implemented, for example, while having a fixed width, it has a lot of things, which are “out of the box”, solved by the fluid design css properties. What it means, is that its not that square and fixed as a fixed design used to be.

The site while still unfinished was asked by the client to be put online today, so even though it has some glitches, and backoffice products are not really inserted by the client, and there are some XHTML validation errors, the site went online a couple of minutes ago. The compatibility and the rest of the standards are eventually going to catch up during the next 10 days, as it happens a lot of times with web sites, done for impatient clients.

I am quite busy working on a several projects, which should go online this march, if everything goes right. First of all, it is a new web site for Interconfor, on which i am working already since January, then the next 2 projects are web design for Web Caravela Design and Scatti Design, which are to go online due in March. Later this month, or may be even in April i expect 2 more websites to go online, which are at this moment do not have even domain yet, but are already in progress, one for the real estate company, and the other one for a small private furniture shop, which is located in the center of Lisbon.

About one month ago, Microsoft has redesigned their home page, to make it more usable, to allow people a better search on their page, etc… “The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements.” - are the (marketing) words published by them selfs promoting a “well done” work to the believers.

As it is written by the webmaster in about the new Microsoft home page, it took them about 6 month to redesign it. If it is true, then it is a very typical corporate product of not-understanding how to get things done. Has anyone expected a better visual and usable work from Microsoft ? Not me, that for sure, as i have never seen any visual presentational work, worth remembering. They are making me understand the whole meaning of the word wrapper in the worst sense possible when i look at their new home page, they are not using mouse hover status when going over the menus, creating a half second delay when passing over it, using so many types of the blue that i have even lost its count, writing a copyright above the footer - with no disrespect to disabled people, but someone, who designed this page was blind, deaf and actually testing www.google.com ?

From the web standards point of view, going “forward” to using invalid HTML 4.0 Transitional (sweet old 1995 or 1996) is such a typical waste of potential. Who are the developers ? Guys, either you are new to whole that web thing, or your bosses are nuts, and if it is so, ignore them and make some good changes to that page, for your own sake. An interesting meta tag “DCSext.wt_target” is revealing users browser and platform - Microsoft most probably has already forgotten the money they have paid, for wrong handling Opera by MSN a couple of years ago, when they were sending script with errors to disable access for people using this browser. No, everything seems to be ok when visiting this page with Opera, but it is not a good signal when i see such information as there are so many plugins to change the user agent identification string.

Not everything is bad, as the design has become more clean, more usable, no table-based design ( congratulations, it is a big step forward to the current state of the web), though i still do not understand why “developers” and “it professionals” are two different categories. I think that the most people are expecting something extraordinary when it is about some big companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google, that’s why any other result is not acceptable, because being able to choose between the very best developers and usability specialists available they could have done much better work.

Fazit: guys and girls, if it took you 6 month to redesign one page, then forget about redesigning the complete site, you will not it end until the end of this century. =O)

Lately, all over the net, there were written so many articles about doctypes, i have even joined some comentaries to some of the discussions. I have no doubt, if its possible, then one should try and implement sctrict doctype, no matter if its Html or xHtml - a bettrer standartisation will be possible, only if we will set some good examples. There are moments, especially when using some javascript library, when complete compatibility with strict doctypes is impossible, but with every day, the number of such solutions is getting lower and lower, so i think that there are not too many excuses now for ignoring the fact, that transitional doctype was suggested only as a temporary _transitional_ solution.

So after this thought i have decided to adopt strict doctypes in all those projects that i am implementing at this moment, including a new design for this very site, which right now is scheduled for late december.