S.T. wrote:
>
Why _should_ it look identical? _WHY_ ?
Because it's a commercial site.
Again - Why? What's the commercially valuable advantage that this
conveys?
The advantage is time. Opportunity cost. Whatever you want to term it.
>"Identical" means you're able to present the
*exact* impression you want to give
I've never seen a commercial site that had an "exact impression". To be
pedantic, I've seen an awful lot of _precise_ specification of sites
(.psd is the culprit) and very little _accuracy_ to it. Why is it so
crucial that a border is 3.5pixels wide when it only has that size in
the first place because of the caffeine-twitching mouse of some
pointybearded dezyner. These "decisions" that must be so vitally
preserved aren't even conscious decisions, they're random brushstrokes
in Potatoshop.
First off, I have no idea what "dezyner" means.
I'm not worried about a few pixels here and there. If the site isn't
dead-on exact across browsers, doesn't really matter. Safari's giving some
div 2px of margin that other browsers aren't? So what? Provided it doesn't
*look* broken because of that minor shift, not much point worrying about it.
A few pixels here or there is unlikely to make-or-break a surfer's opinion
or experience. Anything that appears broken (i.e. a 2px contrasting streak
across the middle that doesn't look like it belongs there) is a huge cause
for concern as it doesn't convey a sense of reliability and consistency.
Again - you can't do identical, even if you try. FF on my large and
small screen machines varies more than FF vs. IE does. What are you
going to do, open a new fixed-size browser window?
I'm going to design based on an 800x600 browser, which covers 97%+ of my
audience if I trust Google Analystics. These are the glory days of web
design, as opposed to 2001 when 640px still had it's place. 800px is just
about perfect as I can keep a design compact enough to keep various eye-cues
within range of eachother, yet still present content with enough width to
entice (hopefully) reading said content while putting vital navigation
alongside.
Should the browser's width grossly exceed 800px, no problem as design will
still pull the eye where I want it to. Smaller than 800px (or more like
700px, really)... I can rest easy that dominant sites have that surfer used
to such inconveniences (with folks like the L.A. or N.Y. Times taking it a
step further and designing based on 1024)
Bottom line... fluid layouts for competive commercial websites are dead.
Unless you're Amazon.com.
>When all is said and done a commercial
site's purpose is to drive revenue - not ensure that the most obscure
means
of browsing receive equal treatment.
Yes, do things that are commercial valuable. Pixel-consistency isn't.
Nor is using sloppy techniques that exclude customers you can easily
support with competent standards-based work.
What you term "sloppy" is irrelevant. All things being equal, 'clean' code
is preferred over 'sloppy' code. But 99.5%+ of your audience really doesn't
care. If you can whip out a "sloppy" page in two hours using DW versus 4
hours handcoding validating markup, and use those spare two hours focusing
on your layout and visual cues to better your conversions from 2.1% to 2.15%
you're far off better in an economic sense. The overwhelming majority of
your audience uses browsers than can compensate for imperfect markup and
your improvements to marketing is pure gravy. W3C spitting out it's seal of
approval does exactly nothing for your bottom line.
>In my case, 99.82% of our site's visitor view using IE, FF/Moz, Netscape,
Safari and Opera.
Sure. 99+% easily, not counting bots. So how many of those use a
Gecko-like renderer and how many are still stuck with a Mosaic
derivative? The discussion here is about differences at that level, not
the obscure stuff. 40% of domestic browsers being FF in some EU
countries, this isn't an ignorable fraction.
I design so IE6+, FF1+ and Safari-whatever look like I wish. That's some 95%
of my market. I'm not really manipulating the DOM, so I'm fairly
comfortable the other 4.5% is probably right. Cover my bases with Safari
and IE's quirks and it's pretty likely it looks clean across the board.
Again, it's a "choose your battles wisely" situation. I would prefer to
KNOW it looks correct on all modern browsers but I'm not going to test the
padding of every float to ensure it's dead-on for some 0.3% market share
deviant. That time's better spent polishing copy for surfers or adding
content the Slurps and Googlebots will pick up.
>>Safe to say not a lot of people are using their
cellphones shopping for $5K vacation packages.
How on earth do you predict that?
Would you be so ready to dismiss $5k short-notice business-class air
travel?
If I really believed there was an economic model for cell/PDA surfers at my
company (which I don't, but that's not to say it'll always be the case) I'd
develop a WAP site or whatever for it. I've never bothered, but I'm almost
certain between .htaccess, httpd.conf and server-side scripting there's a
very reliable means to deliver content to these users without forcing me to
design for my bread-and-butter surfers under some sort of lowest common
denominator logic.
I've done a couple WML apps before. It's pretty trivial. If I thought the
market was there, I would certainly do it. I've no doubt over time I will,
but there's no way I'm altering presentation for 99.8% of my audience to do
so.
>I'll
happily ignore a cell phone surfer if it means a minisculy better shot at
converting a sale from the next 554 'conventional' visitors to my site.
So what evidence do you have that you even _need_ to ignore a mobile
device ?
I'm particularly curious about your logic that deliberately breaking
standards will improve your conversion rates !
I'm not saying deliberately write code that doesn't validate. I'm saying
there's infinitely better ways for most designers to spend their time than
worrying about W3 bitching you have a <ptag without a closing version.
For all the misery non-uniform browsers put us through, at least take solace
in the fact they all compensate for the minor 'errors' that may exist in our
code and take advantage of that time to better your site's conversion
performance.
>Non-commercial sites (i.e. governmental, research, education, etc.) and a
subset of commercial sites, namely Pagerank 8+ bohemoths, have the luxury
of
designing around a "content is king" philosophy.
We all have this "luxury". Content is the thing that drives traffic,
damn near the _only_ thing that drives traffic.
Content is crap in most business' websites, with the glaring exception of
SEO which requires an ungodly delicate balancing act between the two.
The most profound error most designers make it believing visitors on their
site are interested in their content. They're not. They're skeptical to
begin with and they know exactly where their Back button is. They are on a
site to find an answer or solution to their probelm. And they want that
answer or solution FAST. The designers job is to make it painfully clear
that what they are seeking can be found where they ended up.
If you can detail 99% of a product in 5 paragraphs or 70% of the same
product in 5 bullet points or 5 sentences, you're MUCH better off spitting
out the bullet points, with a small link to 'details' to cover the other 30%
that most consumers will never touch, and getting on to the next step in
solving that consumer's problem.
Why? Because nearly all your audience will never even ponder reading 5
paragraphs despite the fact that your content may be more useful to them
than any other site they'll find on the topic. Unless you're a proven
internet commodity they simply won't risk wasting 75 seconds of their time
for you to prove yourself. THEY WON'T READ IT. Period. Give them 5 bullets
they can read in 12 seconds and you've got a shot. Combine that with visual
cues that you know are in within eyesight of your bullets, and these cues
solve the next next solution or answer they now seek, and you really start
to have a chance for a conversion.
Design some fluid layout that caters to every screen ratio on the planet and
you're now risking them getting the answer to their first question from you
and moving elsewhere to solve their new problem. The surfer has no loyalty
to your site, despite it's ability to answer one question.
There was a famous retail site that established the principle of
"design is king". It was called boo.com
>The vast majority of sites have about 3 seconds to
instill a sense of confidence in the consumer that *this* is the site
they want to be on.
Right. So <tablemarkup and a few <font>s is how to do it?
If it's faster for someone to design like that, and that freedom allows them
to dedicate more time to focus on conversion techniques, then most
certainly... yes, that's how to do it.
>The consumer doesn't care if your site was handcoded to exact W3 specs or
made in FrontPage 98.
The customer cares if it works _for_them_. The way to achieve this is
to use the standards. It's quick, it's cheap, it's applicable to a
broad range of targets and it _works_.
Again, time is a fixed commodity. In most cases you're better off creating
a better experience for 90% of your audience than creating a neutral
experience for 100%. In current web design scenarios it's not even close as
you can design to cater towards 99%+ of your audience.
>They couldn't care less about XHTML, DTD-Strict,
tabled layout versus CSS, etc. Neither should the designer, unless that
designer is working for a client who wants it.
A designer who doesn't understand this isn't a competent designer.
Again, 99% of the surfers have no idea who's a 'competent' designer and
wouldn't care if they knew. Focus solely on those 99% of your surfers and
solving their problems, without the slightest regard to whether your site
will stand up to criticism in a CSS newsgroup, and you'll be in much better
shape.
>I'm always boggled by the number of small business sites I see that boast
all their "Validates In...!!!" links in their footers, yet have a
marginal
(at best) call to action.
So you claim that bad commercial design is caused by good technical
implementation ? An interesting theory....
Clearly that's not what I said. My point was priorities are totally out of
whack in far too many cases. I think you know what I was saying however...
perhaps you just don't like people questioning your opinions. Or perhaps
you do. Personally I find this thread an interesting exercise.
