Igor’s Renderings
After experimenting with a couple of designs and scripting ideas, I was asked to put a site together for a local non-profit association. I’m using a lot of CSS, but I’m sticking with tables. I have a feeling that the stats will reflect more Netscape 4 than I really want to deal with. I’m trying to do the site without using graphics as navigational elements. Use the a:hover class to simulate rollovers without javascript and you can almost ditch that old hack. I’ve been testing it out on a new design for fourblogs, but it wasn’t until this new design that I got it to work properly.
Since they’re a non-profit, I’m going to use Movable Type as the CMS. I can set it up like I did for the new mkelley.net page, have categories as the page sections. Works well and if a page needs to be added, I wouldn’t have to do it. Their getting hosting for free, as long as the traffic isn’t too high. I would offer to host it, but that would almost be a conflict of interest, so I won’t.
Usability is a key for this site, so I’m having to really hunker down and watch how I specify my coding. So, I’ve popped open my Nielsen book and Mark’s online book and have my Krug book close at hand.
August 31st, 2002 at 3:08 am
Similarly, I was asked to design and write a website for a local non-profit organisation. I agonised over the decision to stick with tables or use CSS. In the end I decided that all those Netscape 4.x visitors would probably be used to the occasional page looking odd, as if the designer preferred a bland monochrome scheme predominated by text, when in actuality the @import tag just isn’t supported by their browser.
After creating the website at http://www.community-minibus.org/ (don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a shameless self-promotion for generating hits, as after all, you either need a community transport solution in Manchester or you don’t, and the content is certainly static) I delighted in seeing the difference between the CSS-enabled and the plain old vanilla versions, like suddenly being introduced to Technicolor (in the sweet Opera browser use Ctrl-G). I like the design because it’s very clean.
Yesterday I read a statistic that I didn’t immediately believe. It stated that Microsoft controls 96% of the browser market. I took a quick look at the stats for the non-tabled CSS website. In the six months it has been running, Netscape 4.x doesn’t even get a mention. Out of 3,800 hits, Analog tells me that no more than 12 (the lower threshold) of those can be the old Mozilla browser.
I feel reassuringly vindicated.
August 31st, 2002 at 10:08 am
On the main site I run, erlanger.org, we get about 20k hits a month and I would say those stats are almost right. I get about 88% IE and 6% Mozilla/Netscape. IE was at 80% in April.
I’ve been rebuilding that site since April and just this week decided that the stat changes warranted more CSS and XHTML.
The site I’m working on for the non-profit is for a Chaplains group. The computers a lot of them use are not “modern”, donated machines, and the stats reflect something like 10-15% Netscape and very low IE 6 usage.