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Insights

Insights

Size Matters (update)

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It would seem the march to larger screen sizes proceeds:“The data reflects a continuing trend of users moving to larger screen resolution sizes,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The screen resolution size people are using is a critical factor for developers when it comes to web design, particularly in the case of fixed width web pages.” – StatCounter Global Statshttp://gs.statcounter.com/press/screen-resolution-alert-for-web-developers

The company’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats reports that for the first time 1366×768 has become the most popular screen resolution worldwide, having overtaken 1024×768.

 

Reach Out & Touch

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When creating content for the web, it is a good idea to remember that many people will be viewing the content on smartphones.
Be sure that you add dialing to any phone number in text and a hotspot on any image that references in display ads a phone number. Many smartphones will convert text automatically – but you have to add this explicitly by adding an href “tel:xxxxxxxxxx” to any text or spot someone may tap. Very similar to a mailto:

Customers looking at web content on their phones now have come to expect to tap a phone number and then tap CALL. You can insure that this will function across all mobile platforms by adding the above code.

Mobile “Phones”

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In the past couple of years, new breeds of computers found their way into our pockets, purses and briefcases. No longer is there the form factor comprised of solely the desktop and/or the laptop. A whole host of new names have crept into modern argot. Ipads. Iphones. Androids. Xooms. Ultra-portable Laptops. Netbooks. In Dash systems. These new devices are no longer powered by the supposed “standard’s bearers” of Apple or Microsoft. A host of new players like Google, Linux., Palm OS, Symbian, amongst many others are competing ferociously for your attention and fervently for your monthly subscription lucre.

Steve Jobs’s public fight with Adobe over Flash represents the barest hint of the challenges graphics artists and web development teams confront when trying to create content for this fractured world of 24/7 connectivity. The “perfect” world is promised to us all in the form of HTML5, as though this “standard” will provide platform interoperability. It’s way way too early to make the assertions currently being bandied about tools and techniques that are promised “real soon now.” What is a graphic artist or web developer to do in this environment right NOW?

We might lament the fact that Flash animations and videos won’t play on a hundred & twenty million devices and bristle at Steve Jobs intransigence. Our clients, however, take a more mercenary view and demand that THEIR content display EXACTLY the same on every platform. Errrr, Uhmmm, Uhhhh – that’s what they pay us for – right? After all, we’re the content creation experts – right?

It was during one of these lamentations that a colleague blurted out, “I am going to do a site that is nothing but PNG files with hotspots – not a single bit of text, no style sheet, nothing! In a strange way – it’s not a bad idea. We have done a couple of brochure sites where each & every web page consists of a one-column, two row table and two PNG files. It can be done and the pages display perfectly on every platform we’ve tested them on. Try it – you might be surprised – One very important caveat! If you do a site that is all images – it’s very important to describe, keyword and metatag that site so search engines will know what to do with it.

One other caveat is that this design technique is only appropriate for the type of content that rarely, if ever changes. One example we did was for a personal trainer → and then, in turn, linked a menu choice to a google sites blog so that she could have a beautiful ‘brochure’ and a platform to easily update.

Some day our prince will come to give us platform independence. Some day. Real Soon Now. For now, we have clients to satisfy.•

Size Matters

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When you look at your 1080p HD computer monitor, you are looking at over 2,000,000 pixels – 1920 wide and 1080 high. It is quite a bit of real estate. As these monitors have replaced older computer monitors, many websites designed only a few years ago have begun to resemble a mailing label lost in a giant background.

Websites have to be designed for some lowest common denominator. What screen resolution should designers utilize that will satisfy the widest audience? The current thinking is that we are in a transition from 800 pixels wide that is commonly thought to correspond to monitors that have a resolution of 800×600 pixels.

Research seems to suggest that this resolution has fallen to a tiny minority of desktops. In addition we have to consider the scaling issues attendant with smartphones.

Our designs currently specify a width of 920-960 pixels. The lowest common denominator in screen resolutions would be an Ipad and the many inexpensive Netbooks that utilize a native resolution of 1024×768.

A page designed with this width will display properly on 90% of the screens currently in use. Another school of thought is liquid design where the page will adjust to 100% of the screen width. With such a large variety of large monitors your page design can look pretty ridiculous when a nicely formatted 8 line paragraph becomes a single line of text 2560 pixels wide!

For a detailed breakdown of these statistics visit the Browser Statistics Page →
at w3schools.com. They have compiled informative statistics to guide thinking in these questions. There really isn’t a correct answer to this dilemma – it’s an exercise in tradeoffs•

A Picture . . .

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. . . is worth a thousand words. Not So Smart. Servers. Phones.

I had a rant about the difficulty of ‘talking’ to smartphones and the difficulties of just what smartphones do with the info you send them, and, well, while indulging in the guiltiest of pleasures – XKCD.COM.  – they did all my work for me! Be sure to visit this worthwhile time-waster!

Retro SEO

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Search Engines Aren’t New – They Just Have New Forms

The earliest attempts to ‘game’ search engines are best exemplified by the amazing products manufactured by a number of companies all with the same name – ACME – that Wile E. Coyote used in his futile attempt to catch the Road Runner. The company name and its variety of products also makes appearances in a number of Looney Tune cartoons.

ACME? Search Engines? Indeed.  While many would believe that Acme products are just a cartoon invention, in fact, Acme was the name of many companies in the 1920s & 1930s for a very good reason. First, Acme is from the Greek,  the peak, zenith, prime and denoting the best of something – The name Acme was a mark of quality & distinction.

Second, companies picked this name so that they would appear in the beginning of the first business directories (phone books – another new invention at the time!) published back then. And it worked – it became a very popular name for companies for that reason. When our educational system no longer taught Greek to students, the name became meaningless. Looney Tunes’s animators picked that name in the 1950s just as Acme was falling into disuse.

Companies trying to acquire primacy in the phone book resorted to ‘manipulating’ the yellow pages by naming their companies AAA towing or A-1 plumbing supply.  Again, in an attempt to get into the actual physical ‘first page of results’ of that day and age’s ‘category’ (search term). It would be an interesting exercise to discover what companies are naming themselves today; the likelihood is that AAA this or A-1 that is becoming an anachronism in much the same way that ACME company names became. Today, search engine optimization is a black art of titles, key words, descriptions, meta-tags & endless speculations of what the hundreds of search engines and cyberspace directories perceive as ‘relevant.’  It is an important component of web site design with a lot of misinformation bandied about. An excellent clear headed reference article can be found HERE at searchenginewatch.com. It’s a worthwhile read that will somewhat demystify the process. But, remember – search engine optimization has been going on for a long, long time – it’s just taken on a new form of trying to gain a customer’s attention. Remember that the next time you watch the Road Runner escape from Wile E. Coyote’s mad implementations of ACME manufactured products!  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.