Well I started this post knowing full well there’d be plenty of resolution posts around as we enter this new year, and having not got this finished quickly, there are plenty around. You can’t really make anyone follow a resolution and you should all take up your own but here’s five suggestions from me, if you have room in your life for 12 then head over to Six Revisions and have a read of A Designer’s List of New Year’s Resolutions.
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Category Archives: Random thoughts and musings
10 things to write instead of list posts
Merry Christmas to everyone, it’s been a busy few days but I thought I’d just put out a little post which will likely be my last before the New Year.
So thanks to everyone for reading the blog this year and here is my take on something which I have a feeling may have been done before somewhere.
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Why are you browser testing last?
We always seem to leave browser testing till the end, open up Internet Explorer and within about 10 seconds of page load there’s a variety of swear words and we go off to hack our CSS or put in IE only style sheets. God help you if you go crazy and open up IE6, you’re sure to find some form of mess awaiting you.
Recently though my work habits have changed and I’ve decided to stop leaving it until the end, this has been prompted by a few things such as approaching the end of a project having not checked in IE7 and sending a colleague off to show the site to a client who, you guessed it uses IE7. (Sorry Andrew!)
Coupled with that I’ve started to develop sites in Google Chrome. I was impressed with Google Chrome when it first came out and apart from a few too many crashes with flash content it was pretty slick. However the lack of developer tools left me developing in Firefox and using two different browsers seemed a bit impractical.
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5 things I’ve learnt this month whilst blogging
Well I’ve been doing this web design blogging for a month now. Sure I’ve been working in web design and development for years and I’ve blogged before occasionally keeping fifthandlast.com updated but this is my first time blogging about web related topics. So what have a learnt? A few things actually but here’s 5, mostly learnt from buggering something up. Continue reading
Who are you designing for?
When I started writing on this blog I thought to myself “don’t churn out loads of IE6 posts”, well, I let myself get a little indulgent and wrote one and since then one thought has occurred to me reading people’s anti IE6 comments and all the bring down IE6 websites. A lot of them have quite simply missed the point of the whole thing.
I’m sure we can all agree that IE6 is not a good browser, that it should be gotten rid of and that until Microsoft unplug support it will still be around, but you shouldn’t stop supporting it because YOU don’t like it. According to browser statistics from October Firefox has surpassed IE6 in terms of users but a quick scroll down shows a whopping 23.30% of the market share still sits with IE6! That’s nearly a quarter of internet users still using IE6, sad and annoying – yes, but can you really turn away that many users simply for using a rubbish browser?
So you should really be asking who are you designing for? Are you designing for you and all your colleagues using Safari on the Mac or are you designing for the rest of the world? To reach as many people as possible? Continue reading