The Push Back

I've done a great deal of reading, studying, and discussing usability for the Web, and while I've adapted a lot of my design and code practices to accommodate what people tell me is best, I have to draw the line somewhere.

This is the beginning of the resistance.
Welcome to the Fred Rebellion.

1. 800 x 600
The belief that most of the people in the world have at least this as their screen resolution, and using the principles of lowest common denominator, every site should be designed to fit this size.

According to the Fred Rebellion: Attention 800 x 600'ers, your time is over. Assuming that people that hit our Website are current clients, potential clients, family or friends, our stats over the last two months are good a base of information to look at:


'Nuf said here, the time for 1024 is upon us. When Flash was appearing on 94% of the machines worldwide there were more than enough people claiming that Flash has become a standard that could be used, where are those people now?

Additionally, I've noticed that since I started using a resolution higher than 1024 x 768, I've stopped looking at browser screens maximized. This leads to the argument that people naturally keep their browser windows to fit 800 x 600 (as was the case of a recent discussion here at iMarc). I don't believe this to be true, I think the user just widens the screen to be about 100 pixels greater than whatever the site is currently set to be, so a browser window 'naturally sized' to fit sites is just a by-product of archaic coding.

By the way, there was 1 visitor to iMarc in the past two months that was on a 640 x 480 resolution. Notice how no one cares about them.

2. 100% Width Sites
The belief that for maximum flexibility, a Website should stretch itself to 100% of the screensize.

According to the Fred Rebellion: No, never. This can completely ruin the design of any site, and by coding at 100% width, standards will never move forward. There will never be a push to code for ANY resolution, let alone the 1024 x 768 that I want. Additionally, with the incorporation of more and more CSS, this becomes harder to accomplish. I've seen a number of cool things that CSS can do, but I code for whatever is the cleanest to read, the simplest concept to understand, and the easiest to get to work. If I'm spending time positioning a million div's when a quick table will do just fine, all I lose in the end is time.

(And I hear that time == money.)

3. "Just Add Another Link"
Another discussion that came up recently was about the blurb on our home page. I've taken a screenshot for you (right) so you can see the argument. The thoughts were basically: add a link that goes to the main blog page, and move the "read more" link to be inline with the text. I said that the read more link was already not necessary, since (as I've always been told for anything I build here) that "most people will try to click on the title first," to which the response came, "why not just have both?"

According to the Fred Rebellion: The answer is simple: because having both is unnecessary clutter. If you need to have two ways to do something, the first way isn't clear enough for the user. The titles being the same blue that we use for most of our links is visually key enough that we don't need a 'read more link.' I think a lot of designs lately have lost the use of good white-space, and I think that it's this attitude towards things that is one of the culprits.

4. HTML Title Stuffing
The recent belief that putting full descriptions into HTML titles will improve your Google ranking. Below is a recent site that we did that does this.

According to the Fred Rebellion: This is ugly and unprofessional looking. A title should be something short, concise and exact, and I cannot for the life of me think that this truly matters to Google. I've taken a look at a lot of sites (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!) and what is in their titles? One or two words, that's it. You get to the top by having the best and most useful content, which is what Google intends. These lame hacks to bump yourself up a couple notches are for the insecure and lazy.

Make something worthwhile and the people will come.
Have good content, layout and design and Google will do the rest.
And have you seen what this does to my bookmark/link bar if I save it?

I'd like to save more than one link.

(As an additional note, I also checked out Amazon to find that they too are doing this title stuffing nonsense, but with their 100% width antics, this doesn't surprise me. Stop ruining my user experience!)

I think I'll continue to post more of these blogs on the Fred Rebellion, since there are many more things out there than just this that bother me.
You can either forge the path forward or wait for someone else to do it. The Fred Rebellion has got out its machetes, are you coming with us?