As technology has evolved, the guidelines that many of us learned to
deal with the Web's early limitations are becoming less important, and
in some cases, even liabilities. Here are three aspects of old-school
Web design that it's time to put to rest.
Limited Screen Resolution: Fagetaboutit!
If you had a computer ten years ago, you probably had a VGA monitor with
a massive 640 x 480 screen resolution. If you were really lucky, you
might have had an 800 x 600 pixel screen. This meant that Web sites had
to be significantly limited in width, or users would have to scroll
around. A user with a tiny screen could even get lost scrolling around a
big Web page!
Many sites and web builders are still working with these old-school
resolutions in mind. Unless you're building pages for your local Windows
95 user group, it's probably time to move on to designing for bigger and
better resolutions.
The majority of Web surfers now use screen resolutions 1024 x 768 or
higher. At most Web sites, less than 10-20% of the visitors use lower
screen resolutions. It's time to make life easy for most of your users,
and take advantage of the bigger screen resolutions that they are using.
A high-profile example of this happening is the recent redesign of the
New York Times' site. The layout is built for 1024 x 768 screen
resolution, putting an index of the major site sections along the left
and using four columns to provide news highlights. The most important
content fits in an 800 x 600 pixel area, but the design basically
assumes that users are running at higher screen resolutions.
The Browser-Safe Color Palette: Fagetaboutit!
Along with low screen resolutions, those VGA monitors gave us limited
color depths, dithering and the dreaded Browser-Safe Color Palette.
The Browser-Safe Color Palette was a collection of 216 colors that were
supported by early browsers. You could organize them by hue! You could
organize them by color! But, no matter how you organized them, they were
216 colors that never seemed to include the colors you needed, like the
colors of your company's logo.
At this point, 95% or more of the people browsing the Web are using
higher color depths:
- 256 colors - 5% or less
- Thousands of colors - 13%
- Millions of colors or more - 82%
If your web statistics software captures user screen resolution, check
it; it's likely that users with 256 color screen resolution account for
only a tiny portion of your site's traffic. It's time to design for the
majority of your visitors, rather than the exceptions to the rule.
Multimedia Avoidance Syndrome: Fagetaboutit!
Back in the days, multimedia could kill your website and even your
company. The most famous example of this was probably Boo.com. Boo.com
relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash, making it extremely slow to use.
Most Web users, at the time, had dial-up connections and would simply
leave before Boo's pages would finish loading. Because of experiences
dealing with slow sites and dial-up connections, many web builders avoid
using multimedia.
Times have changed, though. Most US Internet users connect using a
broadband Internet service. About 70% use a high-speed connection, a
jump of about 40% from last year. Broadband is a popular choice for new
Internet users now, too.
While this isn't license to create bloated sites, it does point out that
avoiding multimedia not only is no longer necessary, it may be a
mistake. Some of the most popular sites on the Web, such as YouTube or
MySpace, are real bandwidth hogs. On-demand multimedia is showing up at
all types of sites, and podcasting and video podcasting are letting
publishers create multimedia channels that visitors can subscribe to.
If your site is still avoiding bandwidth-sucking features, it's time to
give this another look. If you keep your Web pages relatively lean,
while incorporating on-demand media content, you can expand your options
for interacting with the majority of your site's visitors, while keeping
dial-up users happy.
Old School Web Design
As the Web evolves, some of the basic guidelines that many web designers
take for granted will become anachronisms. If you're still worrying
about low screen resolutions, browser-safe palettes and slow Internet
connections, your site could get stuck in the past. It's time to rethink
these assumptions and use current technology to make the most of your
visitors' experience at your site.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Web Page Screen Resolution Simulator
http://www.webconfs.com/web-page-screen-resolution.php
WW FAQs: What screen resolution should I design for?
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/resolution.html
Browser Trends
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm
Times Site Redesign Shaped by the Web
http://www.itworld.com/nl/ecom_in_act/04052006/
Web Statistics and Trends
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
US Broadband Penetration Nears 70% Among Active Internet Users
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0604/
Home broadband adoption grew by 40% (pdf)
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Broadband_trends2006.pdf
