Your standards

[rendezvouscp]

I'm starting to design my next website, slated for release in mid-2005 (after Tiger) or the very beginning of 2006 (I'm slightly insane when it comes to release dates for my website, so don't ask why I've picked those times). Anyway, I'm redoing my whole site, and I'm starting off with making it in CSS. But as of late I've wanted to add in some more Javascript on top of what I already have on my site. Then, I realized that my site looks like total crap with anything less than thousands of colors. So, here's my question: what do you support? I know it's mainly a case by case basis (if you want a flash portfolio site, your site is obviously in flash and very high end). But, for those of you who have a mixture of text, movies, and photos, what do you support? Resolution? Standards? Browsers? Colors? Anything you want to add to that list would be great.

Kind of to start things off, I'd like to say that my current site (http://homepage.mac.com/rendezvouscp/) supports at least 800 x 600, is almost completely standards compliant, supports almost all browsers I've run into, and needs at least thousands of colors to look decent.

Thanks for your replies, it'll help me shape what I should support in my next redesign.
-Chase

 

[kiwi-in-uk]

...
Thanks for your replies, it'll help me shape what I should support in my next redesign.
-Chase

Resolution and colours on your current site are fine. If you need more colours for photos etc then make them downloadable files.

Focus on the appearance and design of your site, and compatibility.

For example this site has a nice look and feel but is inaccessible for Safari users.

Think about low bandwidth users (i.e. keep your main pages simple with links to photo pages on request), and think about offering both Quicktime and WMV formats (personally I would ignore the latter - most people now have Quicktime, but that's up to you).

Try to achieve a "pleasurable experience" (like using a Mac!) before you get too worried about resolution and standards.

You have made a great start - keep it up!

 

[brap]

Then, I realized that my site looks like total crap with anything less than thousands of colors...
...if you want a flash portfolio site, your site is obviously in flash and very high end...
...But, for those of you who have a mixture of text, movies, and photos, what do you support? Resolution? Standards? Browsers? Colors? Anything you want to add to that list would be great.

First of all, if a monitor doesn't support 65k colours, they're probably viewing on a 286. Screw'em.

Flash is overused and often very badly, you shouldn't jump to the conclusion that flash is only used by professionals... but yeah, stay away unless you're really good, and really, really patient - especially if developing on your Mac.

Well. Your site is very well thought out from my perspective - centered, 800*600 design is great because it degrades well on my 1600*1200 screen. I usually go for 1024*768 design, though - people need to be dragged forward into the new millenium.
XHTML is a must nowadays, and CSS2 - although validity in CSS isn't required. Simply because there is little knock-on effect if you use platform-specific code, an example being opacity; Moz, KHTML and IE use very different methods, all different to the CSS3 spec! From this, I generally test my sites on Firefox, Safari, IE6, IE5.5 and IE5.2 (though if it's broken in 5.2, I don't care). Also Lynx, just for kicks

Images, though, I agree you may want to split them up and hide until they're requested. Your Australia photos page took ages to load on my 1mbit ADSL. You also may want to consider making the text a little bigger, I found it difficult to read in places.

 

[broken_keyboard]

Even the cheapest computers can do 1024x768 these days...

 

[rendezvouscp]

I'm going to fix the Australia images today, so they shouldn't all load together.

The reason I don't go up to 1024 x 768 is that most of my viewers are still using 800 x 600, or the ones at 1024 x 768 are just happy with what I have now.

I really appreciate all of your comments, and am hoping to hear more. Thanks guys!
-Chase

 

[rendezvouscp]

Well, I've fixed the Australia pictures to use a sidebar to pick the days you want to see. I'm really open to more comments for those of you that are viewing and not posting (not to sound harsh ). Thanks again!
-Chase

 

[Makosuke]

Just noticed your question here, and thought I'd chime in in case you're still checking.

As far as general requirements, it depends entirely on who's the target audience. If it's cutting-edge Mac users, then so long as it's valid and looks good in Firefox and Safari, you're probably fine. If it's a site targeted at international educators, it'd better be viewable in 640X480 on NS4, NS3, and Lynx for that matter.

As a rule of thumb, I aim for sites that look good at 800X600 (but I try to never do fixed width, so people with bigger screens can use them), and look correct in Mozilla, Safari, and IE6. It should also be at least half-decent in IE5, and if the CSS is enough to confuse the heck out of NS4 I just use a hack to hide it all from that monstrosity.

I have a good reason for the 800X600 rule: despite the fact that I have a 1280X1024 screen at work and a huge 1680X1050 at home, I almost never run browser windows much wider than 900 pixels--that way I have more open at one time, and it's tiring to read text on a line much longer than that. I figure I'm not the only one who does this, and so I aim for that as a happy medium. If it isn't completely unusuable at 640X480, that's nice for the deprived, too.

That way, between IE6 and Moz, you've got something like 85% of all surfers, and if the site is valid most alternative browsers will display it perfectly, too, leaving basically the 5-10% who use IE5, which will display most of what IE6 will anyway, the <1% that use NS4, who should be glad to see a CSS-stripped version that works at all (it'll be faster for them, anyway), and a tiny handfull of really old stuff (which, if they can't render CSS at all, will be ok so long as the page is well-formed).

A couple notes on your site, while I'm at it.

First, it's a nicely organized site with a clean layout. The section on design and compatibility is impressively thorough, and although probably overkill it's very cool from a geeky standpoint. I'll probably do that to one or two of my own sites some day when I'm feeling self-indulgant.

That said, two suggestions: One, if IE displays it properly and Mozilla-based browsers don't, you're almost certainly doing something wrong, or in a messy way. Also, make sure you actually validate all the pages (and if you're going so far as to write in XHTML, I'd stay away from those font tags). On a design note, the white text on the second-tier menu is pretty hard to see over the pale background, at least on my screen.

 

[chanoc]

CSS 2.0 and XHTML, nuff said.

 

[rendezvouscp]

Thanks for the replies guys (and gals). It's great feedback, and I'm happy to hear the comments.

EDIT: I'm ditching the current alpha design and going with something different.
-Chase