Category Archives: Random thoughts and musings

How good will IE9 have to be?

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Microsoft have rolled out an IE9 beta, you can have a look for yourself over at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/. I can’t haz IE9 as I’m still on Windows XP (I didn’t upgrade to Vista and haven’t got around to Windows 7 yet) so I’ve have to just have a look at the various round ups and reviews (such as this one – IE 9 gets back in the game)

But as I read over the various improvements in the interface, the new support for up and coming standards and the use of hardware acceleration amongst many other advances, one thought stuck in the back of my mind – how good will IE9 have to be to offer a chance of growing it’s market share again? The answer obviously is pretty damn good.

IE will no doubt maintain the majority share of the browser market for a long time given the large number of users who neither know or care which browser they use, or are quite happy to stick with IE out of comfort. The growth of Google Chrome has shown that users are not unwilling to switch their browser if a better alternative is available. But even if IE produced the best browser by a country mile I’m not sure how much it would effect it’s standing as a browser. Could you see web designers and developers recommending it to their clients? Sure there are plenty of fair minded sensible people out there who would hold their hands up and say yes it is a great browser, but it’s become cool to hate Microsoft and IE and to bemoan their problems. There are many for whom IE would have to show something really really special before they would consider doing anything other than picking at it’s faults.

Still we don’t live in a one browser world and it’s nice to see that Microsoft are finally taking up the baton and producing a more modern browser that supports the standards and innovations that designers and developers like me want to see.

It’s not about succeeding, it’s about trying something new

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There are some very interesting things going on recently in terms of how we put together our sites and it’s leading to quite a few interesting discussions, mostly between those who aren’t ready to even consider using new web technologies until IE offer support for them and those who have whole heartedly embraced the ideas of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. Personally I fall into the latter category, using HTML5 to code up sites and using CSS3 all over the place.

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Are your websites ever going to be bigger than 960px?

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Me and @aarmitage had a little discussion about screen resolution in the office the other day and it’s kind of left me thinking – are we ever going to consistently design websites for screens larger then 1024×768 pixels?

Conventional wisdom as we progressed from 800×600 to 1024×768 was that as bigger screens became affordable and PC usage more common place home users would eventually gravitate to a 1920px width screen and so on so forth. However whilst all your designer mates might have large 1920px screens most home PCs are still 1024×768 and as such web designs are generally fitted to a 960px width to sit comfortably on this size screen. Add into the mix the growth of mobile internet and the announcement of the iPad and we’ve come full circle and are right back designing for smaller screens than ever.

So whilst you may design for designers on larger monitors and we will still have to consider where our background goes beyond the 1024px width will we ever find that a commonplace width for client sites or have we reached our widest “normal” width with our 960px wide site?
Will the transition of internet access from the desktop simply mean that we design more fluid sites and mobile alternatives instead, whilst still sticking to conventional widths?

Sensational headlines and living up to your own hype

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Google Reader screenshot(My RSS reader on a good day)

Recently I’ve been a bit disappointed by a number of articles. They’ve promised me the world and they’ve delivered nothing short of disappointment and badly re-hashed content. But why should I have expected anything? – Because the title of these articles promised so much.
I know blog titles are written to pull in readers, the way we digest the content through twitter and RSS feeds means that titles are written to get people onto the site and add another eyeball to the all important visitor count.
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The homepage is alive and kicking

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To be honest I’ve never written an article as a response to some others I’ve read but I’ve heard recently that the homepage is dead! –

http://www.drawar.com/articles/are-homepages-dead-or-are-we-missing-the-boat/69/

http://feedusblog.com/detail.asp?c=614967

Yep your good old index.php or whatever you use isn’t any good any more, it’s been killed by social media, ad-words and deep linking dropping people right into the belly of your website.
So I doubt you’re all going to delete your homepage and leave users with nothing at the top of your website are you? I thought not, which is exactly why the homepage is alive and kicking.
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