2 Things You Gotta Know
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Browsers
This website is best viewed in
Internet Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024x768.
Did you ever notice this little
statement on a website you visited? Ever wonder what it
means?
If you're making decisions about your website you're gonna
want to get hip to a couple of things.
The first one is Browsers, like
Internet Explorer and Netscape for example. Actually,
they're the only examples because, of all the browsers
that are apt to visit your website, IE will be the browser
used by 90% of your visitors and the other 10% would be
Netscape, Opera and a few other browser programs. Also,
most computers are PCs and IE comes installed on all of
them through the Windows operating system package.
So, via browser market saturation,
IE is about the only game in town. Of course you get people
that prefer Netscape or some other browser but statistically,
all combined, you're talkin' about 9 out of every 10 visitors
to your website are using Internet Explorer to view your
pages.
Well so what you say? OK, now for
the clincher. IE is a better browser when it comes to
web design. It can do more than Netscape so alot of web
designers design for it.
For example, at the top left of
every page of this website is a little image slideshow.
In IE, when the images change, they kinda spin like a
cube turning. In Netscape, it can't show this and the
images just change from one to the next. Not near as nice
as in IE. In some examples the page breaks. There are
about about another zillion examples I could demonstrate
but suffice to say that alot of neat javascripts, java
applets and 'behaviors' that you can use to spiffy up
your website can only be seen in IE and not in Netscape.
Here are the 3 most common ways
web designers deal with this issue.
First, you can dumb down your site
and design for the limitations of Netscape, in which case
you can be sure everything will work in IE.
Secondly, you can just ignore that
10% of the web surfing population and do whatever you
want in IE, realizing that there was no guarantee that
any part of the other 10% were looking for you anyway,
so no big loss.
Now you know that when you see 'This
website is best viewed in Internet Explorer', what they're
really telling you is, if you aren't using IE then you're
probably missing out on something happening on the website.
Thirdly, you can design 2 different
websites and use a javascript to determine what browser
the visitor is using and redirect them to the second site
if they are using Netscape. That works fine but you're
gonna pay more for 2 website designs.
Regardless of how expertly your
website is designed, what your visitors actually see is
totally dependant on what kind of computer they are using
and what the default programs and settings are on that
computer are set to.
With the recent release of Microsoft
WindowsXP with Service Pak2 and Internet Explorer 6, the
default settings issue is dumped right on the computer
owner who suddenly has to figure out why their computer
won't surf websites like it use to. You see, because of
things like little Trojan programs and hidden things that
get downloaded to your computer, the default settings
that are allowing this are now set to not allow it. It's
for security.
Unfortunately, now all the good
stuff is getting blocked, too.
Anybody can change their computer's
'Internet Settings' to block or unblock images, javascripts
and just about anything else a website you're visiting
is trying to download to your harddrive. There's lots
of reasons why someone would choose these options and,
conversely, there's lot's of people who are using the
default settings without knowing that they can change
them for other settings, like an alternative screen view
which could be more desirable than the default view settings.
Now that you're thinking about your
visitor's computer, let's talk about 'Resolution', another
curve ball in the world of web design.
Part II of 'Things You Gotta Know"
deals with Resolution. A really important issue when it
comes to what the limitations of web design are.
Click
Here to read ' 2 Things You Gotta Know - Part
II - Resolution '.
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