Optimizing Web Design

One of the most frustrating things when designing a site is trying to optimize it for everyone to be able to see it. In a lot of ways, this can limit you to the type of content your site provides. I came across this article a few days ago and saved it, as I found it to be inspiring to anyone out there that has ever gotten frustrated trying to make their site look awesome, but at the same time, making it accessible. It's full of great links to ideas, web standards, including the WC3, and so on. Definitely worth a read.

http://www.extremetech.com/print_art...a=22871,00.asp

People should always take the Occam's Razor approach when it comes to website design.

I was on the internet.com web development forum a while back, and the thing that made me leave was the same 2 or 3 guys screaming "Check your pages in the W3C compatability scanner..."

Great, so I have to make sure every one of my 500 pages is formatted perfectly for the 1 blind russian with one arm? I don't think so.

My take on the whole compatability thing is this: Develop for whatever your target market is. It's a waste of time to develop for those you don't intend to view your site (even if they want to), especially if you aint gonna make any money off of them.

My target market is small businesses on small winders networks (IE: Less than 10 machines), so chances are they are using IE5, maybe 6. So that's what I write for. If they run nutscrape, and it doesn't work...oh well.

<this rant is only the opinion of the author and not the opinion of the owners of this site>
hehe

jezter6 you otta been out here during the Netscape/ Explorer wars. Was not easy to do is not easy using DHTML without a clear understandig of WC3 and before standards. Are you programming for you put it " 1 blind russan with one arm"? I know a blind programmer never sees his works but he is really good. So assume IE after all a blind man or woman have no money or need of a service. A one armed person cannot hold a line trimmer and wind the spool of line for it now can they...or maybe they can? rant all you like but your views are very narrow all this out here is for all people to make things equal. Me I'l design for impartments I got a few myself. After all Steven Hawkins cannot speak without a computer voice but look at what he has given to the world. Discount things all you want and then grow up face the world :)

jezter has a point that if its a business site, design for your target market, most companies, big and small use windows so chances are they're gonna be using a newer version of IE, if you want people from all over the world that are just sitting at home to see your site good, design it for IE, the reality is that most people in this world use MS stuff and therefore use IE, sure there are those few million that use mac's but, if they're using a mac do you really care what they think about your site?
and of course palemoon is confusing, i think maybe he just didnt pay attention to his teacher in english...but i think i still get what hes trying to say...

I made a site for Jehnx and it's compitable with everything AND it looks good. :) Text-only rules in some cases.

You don't have to accomodate everyone, but you should do your best to make you site useable by most people. You wouldn't think many blind people use the Internet, but they really are begining to make an impact in some areas. When running a business your target audience is everyone willing to pay for what you are selling :) or at least that has always been my philosophy. Sure you direct the site mainly at certian groups but you need to make sure other groups can use it as well, or you could be losing money.

We have a girl in our e-Commerce program that is bascially completly blind. She has everyone use her laptop every now and then with their eyes closed just to see what it is like. All I can say is that most sites are impossible to use if you can't see, but some are pretty smooth.

This is just what I've been looking for. Thanks, GreekGoddess. :)

Thank you, I have been studying the W3C documentation for some time and doing some studies on how to make attractive, fast and all plataforms/browsers compatible. I have been related on some projects (mainly culture websites) and the conception has always been done targetting these concepts, the task is harder than one could thing at first and many times I think.. "why to spend all this time doing this page if I can use dreamweaver" why not? Quite simple because then I will spend more time cleaning it up and fixing it (when possible).
W3C is essential to the web development there's a need for standarts that overcomes the IE/Mozilla based war (if there's still one going one).
If there's a blind russian man with only one arm wanting to see my page then all my work has been worth it.

Great find, Greek Goddess. I have been looking for information on website accessibility, and this appears to be a good source. Thanks .

I agree with all those above, like a melting pot of everything. I think you should have your sitye accesible to your target audience, i.e if they use netscape, then make it compatible, or just stick with anything as simple as text only, but overall, I agree that this is a great source for the compatibility issues

I think that you should always try to support both IE and Netscape browsers as well. If not, you'll need to specify it on your first intro page or something and live with the fact that you may not get as many visitors to your site.

Most of the code is compatible to both browsers. Personnaly I write my code directly using a text editor. Let say I'm kind of a old core writer, this way you don't have to fu.. around with all the messing up code that most WYSIWYG editors.

Also, there is a lot of new coding features that I'll never use when I know it's not compatible. Usings Javascript, HTML and CSS is enough to get a real nice good looking site. You can also add interactivity with server side scripting such as ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl or by using Flash movies !

A good site to see a great list of sites for their Design is www.coolhomepages.com .

See ya !

I'm doing my best not to be rude, but you can't spend hours designing for "everyone with every disability." Believe me, I would...but my clients wouldn't enjoy my bill for 80 hours of work so that a site works in lynx.

You have to come to your own conclusions about who you hope will visit your site, and who to leave behind. Thank god there are no laws requiring special access for people or web designers would go out of business.

On a more personal note, I'm more of a backend developer, so ASP doesn't matter what the client is, as long as data is returned to the client. :)

Darn..... Here i was floating along fat and happy and G.G. had to go and post this optimizing/html quality thing. Used to be, back in the beginning, i paid special attention to W3C and actually had "Bobby" check my pages before they went 'live'. But time, the rush of more things to do than time to do them in, and a generous portion of overconfidence slowly changed things around. After reading her post, i bounced up to Bobby to test my latest website acquisition (repaired all the broken links, dead pages and took over the wm duties) and promptly got slam-dunked with a page full of Bobby question marks. That's the bad news. The good news is; i got a couple days before the DNS tables update and the site comes up with my name on it instead of the prior wm, so i have time to fix the shortcomings. Thanks, G.G., :) .... i suppose.... (Grrrrrrrrrrrr) :D :D

You might also want to take a look at the 'Viewable with Any Browser Campaign', found here: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Did you check the example of an accessible page from that article GG posted? This: http://ken.me.com.au/
Strange enough it claims to validate with "RDF" and "P3P", things I've never heard of but which still have something to do with W3C. Check the RDF validating, it gives a bunch of warning messages. Oops. :)