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Anyone want a website?
Felix-The-Ghost
Member #9,729
April 2008
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"Would it be usable in Lynx/Links"

:P

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<--- The ghost with the most!
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[Website] [Youtube]

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Anomie said:

That's all well and good, but your job as a website (yeah, you are the website) is to work for everyone. :( No one using a substandard browser will stop to consider that they are using a substandard browser, they will just assume you're lazy and that you only make websites for 'crazy hippies' or something (their email and bank pages work fine, after all). This is especially true when you're trying to build something for a client -- there are no excuses (except maybe for IE6).

Standards compliant markup generally works sufficiently even in substandard browsers. You obviously will want to test this out in at least one browser (e.g., I like to use links and, only if necessary, IE). It isn't critical that a page look beautiful. What matters is that it is readable and browse-able and usable. That's all that practically matters, unless you're trying to sell snakeoil. Again and again people love to complicate matters and completely forget just how elegant simplicity can be.

Anomie said:

When you're just making stuff for yourself, it's fine to take some liberties with who you want to serve and who you don't want to serve (for instance, leaving my website broken in IE<9 is a good way to filter out clients that I maybe just don't want to work for), but if it's a job for someone else it better work for the client's grandmother running AOL 2 on her Windows 95 machine.

Certainly, if you want to enable users to be vulnerable to Easy Hack v0.2.1(tm) script kiddie attacks. ;) They entrust you with developing a secure piece of software for them and part of that is certainly discouraging the use of outdated software when unnecessary. Supporting buggy or vulnerable software is a bad approach. You're better off to just scare the shit out of them with talk of how vulnerable the software is to hackers and scare them into trying something different and scary, but ultimately better for them all around. Users always think that their way is best; despite it being 1000x slower, 100x more error prone, infinitely more vulnerable to malicious persons, etc. It's OK to educate them and even force them to use something different. It's not about being religious though (i.e., pushing your own ideals). It's merely about giving them practical guidelines for security and sanity. That's part of what they hired you, a computer professional, for.

Anomie said:

Speaking of that, I read through the Wikipedia article for Embrace, Extend and Extinguish about a week ago, which is a term used internally by Microsoft to describe the process of smothering competition by extending standards in such a way that the market is forced to become subsidiary or obsolete. :-/

So the whole 'IE is incapable of Internet' game is a back-assward strategic ploy by Microsoft to keep their incompetent software relevant in the face of capable competition?

Microsoft does this with every product that they own. If you look at their track record they really don't deserve to be as successful as they are. They don't even make an effort to write useful software. They have entire departments that specialize in figuring out how to FORCE YOU TO USE THEIR SHIT instead of moving on to something better. I imagine this is where most of their money is invested, in fact.

...you should be writing with two audiences in mind:

  1. Users

  2. Search Engines

When you don't focus on that and instead focus on perfectly slicing to an XHTML/CSS compliance standard, you're writing for the wrong audience - a layout engine.

There is also a third audience that you should also be paying attention to, and that's yourself. Or, the "the developers" if there is more than one person working on the site. You should write in a way that is easiest for you (and/or them) to work with.

The whole POINT of the standards is to satisfy all of those concerned the first time without having to pick and choose. The users will be happy because things will just work, and you'll get to that point a lot quicker. Maintenance is also much easier and therefore faster and therefore cheaper. Search engines are happy because the markup does a better job of describing the document structure and there's less fluff that really doesn't matter to search getting in the way. AFAIK, standards compliance is something that Google's ranking algorithms take into account (i.e., it's a good thing). As for developers, for the reasons already cited, developers should also prefer standards compliance. It means a whole lot more for less.

Before I get bammed ( :P ), just know that my main point that it's important to focus your energies on the priorities, instead of following an arbitrary doctrine.

Too late. >:( ;) Web developers have been confusing their priorities since the beginning and it really hasn't been working very well. Instead of wasting time and money developing workarounds for browser bugs and incompatibilities to satisfy the people that don't know what they want, developers should focus their energy on fixing those bugs and refusing those incompatibilities (i.e., get them standardized before touching them) and producing something that the users/clients actually want.

p.s. In some cases there's also a fourth audience, the client. But that's a whole different can of worms.

Clients don't know what they want. It's up to you to help them see. Certainly if a client comes to you looking for a work-of-art Web site to sell snakeoil then it had better look close to pixel-perfect across all popular browsers. Often, though, the users couldn't care less about the "pizazz" and only want to get whatever they came for ASAP and move on with their day. Spending all that extra money for that pixel perfect work of art is actually NOT what the client truly wants, whether they realize it or not.

Anomie
Member #9,403
January 2008
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bamccaig said:

Certainly if a client comes to you looking for a work-of-art Web site to sell snakeoil then it had better look close to pixel-perfect across all popular browsers.

I think you're failing to empathize with the average person. :-/ You keep reinforcing the idea that legitimately valuable information/services will prevail regardless of presentation, and that presentation (beyond efficiency) is only valuable if you're trying to bamboozle people.

The fact is, presentation promotes is the basis for the organization's professionalism and credibility to people without a knowledgeable, critical eye (more than 70% of people, I'd guess). If Company A delivers a competent service and Company B delivers an outstanding service, presentation can still easily be the deciding factor.

For instance: Microsoft. Through apparent professionalism and attractive presentation (they call these 'psychological services', things that endear the user to the organization or make them feel secure in their relationship with the organization), Microsoft trounces much more capable opposition in their market(s).

______________
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Anomie said:

I think you're failing to empathize with the average person. :-/ You keep reinforcing the idea that legitimately valuable information/services will prevail regardless of presentation, and that presentation (beyond efficiency) is only valuable if you're trying to bamboozle people.

The fact is, presentation promotes is the basis for the organization's professionalism and credibility to people without a knowledgeable, critical eye (more than 70% of people, I'd guess). If Company A delivers a competent service and Company B delivers an outstanding service, presentation can still easily be the deciding factor.

Ultimately if the software is used for productivity then the user will prefer a functional product over an attractive one. The eye candy seems wonderful at first glance, but reliably getting the job done trumps eye candy every time. I'm not saying that your Web site should be bland and plain text and look the same in links as it does in Chrome. :P You can still make it look reasonably pretty without having to throw standards out the door. I think my Castopulence Software Web site is a good example of this. It has some color and layout to it without interfering too much with its use on older or less capable browsers. It doesn't look pixel perfect in all browsers and I never made any effort for it to. I did the bare minimum to get it displaying reasonably well across browsers and left it at that. :) It is quite usable in links, which I think is a big plus being somebody that isn't afraid to operate from a plain-text virtual terminal. ;D

Anomie said:

For instance: Microsoft. Through apparent professionalism and attractive presentation (they call these 'psychological services', things that endear the user to the organization or make them feel secure in their relationship with the organization), Microsoft trounces much more capable opposition in their market(s).

We've already touched on why Microsoft is "successful" and it has nothing to do with the quality of their products or the presentation therein. It's entirely to do with vendor lock-in and anti-trust tactics. Indeed, Microsoft's Web site(s) have traditionally been some of the WORST Web sites I've ever used, both in presentation quality and usablility. :P

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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bamccaig said:

Microsoft's Web site(s) have traditionally been some of the WORST Web sites I've ever used, both in presentation quality and usablility.

I was googling some MS info for this forum a few days ago, and the web page in question said something about not all the info being shown because the info wasn't pertinent to the OS detected by the browser. :P

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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You can't complain about MSDN documentation though.

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"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I was googling some MS info for this forum a few days ago, and the web page in question said something about not all the info being shown because the info wasn't pertinent to the OS detected by the browser. :P

I had that happen to me a few months ago! IIRC, I was trying to figure out why ASP.NET was throwing an obscure error at my face. I was Googling with Firefox in GNU/Linux (since I had GNU/Linux and Windows running simulatenously; one of which was virtualized). Microsoft basically refused to give me the answer because I wasn't browsing from a Windows system. ::) It's like the most blatant abuse of the Web from a hardware or software vendor that could be imagined.

Anomie
Member #9,403
January 2008
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bamccaig said:

Ultimately if the software is used for productivity then the user will prefer a functional product over an attractive one.

In the very specific niche of 'productivity software', you're probably right. ;) In general however, you're looking at about 30% (I'd bet) who would convert to the less-pretty alternative in favor of functionality. You're assuming again that people approach things with a critical mind -- they do not.

Quote:

Microsoft's Web site(s) have traditionally been some of the WORST Web sites I've ever used, both in presentation quality and usability.

I don't mean 'presentation' to only mean websites. :P It's a general principle.

Quote:

We've already touched on why Microsoft is "successful" and it has nothing to do with the quality of their products or the presentation therein. It's entirely to do with vendor lock-in and anti-trust tactics.

Imagine if Microsoft never ran professional-quality ads, had no attractive marketing materials, advertised only by black-and-white copies of poorly designed posters stapled to telephone poles, and so on. No one would pay enough attention to them for their current tactics to work at all. They could never have grown to the size they did without pouring billions into presentation.

______________
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Anomie said:

Imagine if Microsoft never ran professional-quality ads, had no attractive marketing materials, advertised only by black-and-white copies of poorly designed posters stapled to telephone poles, and so on. No one would pay enough attention to them for their current tactics to work at all. They could never have grown to the size they did without pouring billions into presentation.

I think somebody needs to go ask Wikipedia for a history lesson... :(

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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I thought it was especially juicy when an MS website promising "We have the way out" (of Unix) crashed when they switched to MS products after everyone was having a good laugh because it displayed fine when it was running on a FreeBSD server!

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-874132.html

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Anomie
Member #9,403
January 2008
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bamccaig said:

I think somebody needs to go ask Wikipedia for a history lesson...

Anomie said:

Microsoft never ran...

I'll assume you're equating "never ran" and "didn't run at first". :( From what I understand, early Microsoft had limited success on its own merit (in a world with little competition). I'm talking about maybe the last ten, twenty years, when it became relevant to people in general. (nvm, this really doesn't have any bearing on what we were talking about :-/ There's a world of businesses out there that bear out the point I was making, the technicalities of this one don't matter.)

______________
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Anomie said:

From what I understand, early Microsoft had limited success on its own merit (in a world with little competition). I'm talking about maybe the last ten, twenty years, when it became relevant to people in general.

This retelling is based on what I learned in college and read at random periods over my career as a computer programmer so don't expect this to be completely accurate. It is to the best of my knowledge how it all happened, but I may be wrong about certain parts. I don't feel like re-reading the history right now, only to reiterate it for you when you could just go read and the history yourself. ;)

The original 2 or 3 to later become Microsoft were working with a third party hardware vendor, who had owned the rights to some OS that I think these three had either developed or modified for use on its systems. Gates suggested that they sell licenses to the OS, but the third party only cared about hardware; the software just being a necessary offer to make the hardware useful.

However it happened, Gates ended up getting the rights to this software, and started Microsoft to further develop it for competing hardware vendors. They managed to weasel an exclusive deal with IBM or something to basically bundle the OS that became MS-DOS with every PC sold. In other words, you bought DOS whenever you bought an IBM PC. This was the beginning of Microsoft's vendor lock-in.

From then Microsoft just continued to force its software on people, having it pre-installed on the vast majority of PCs purchased for the past 30 years or whatever. Most users didn't even know what an operating system was! DOS (and later Windows) was just part of the computer to them. They didn't know they even had a choice (indeed, back in the era of the first PCs, they might not have on IBM PC hardware). Law makers were (and, to a large extent, remain) just as oblivious.

These days the cycle just continues for the most part. Windows (and various Windows software) is bundled with most PCs when you buy them (usually against your will) and most consumers are completely oblivious that there are other, better options available. People have also just been used to DOS and Windows, and more importantly, used to DOS-only or Windows-only software that they feel is required for their work or play. Microsoft effectively has done everything in its power since its inception to keep PC consumers locked-in with everything that it touches.

For a completely accurate retelling, go ask Wikipedia or Google.

Anomie
Member #9,403
January 2008
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So in the interest of this thread not dying, here's an update. The only thing left is to figure out what's up with the hours and pricing. :-/ They don't really have enough information to justify their own categories, if you ask me. The hours have been moved to the header area, but they look cramped up there. Pricing is still lined up with the other categories, but it's awkwardly small. I'll be able to think about it more over the weekend.

I want to provide both pieces of information as little tidbits up in the header area somehow, but that'd take a completely new layout. So there might be a second draft!

{"name":"604859","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/7\/575aa0134889aebc99a8e4c714f9fb85.png","w":1980,"h":2027,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/7\/575aa0134889aebc99a8e4c714f9fb85"}604859

______________
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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Anomie said:

I want to provide both pieces of information as little tidbits up in the header area somehow, but that'd take a completely new layout. So there might be a second draft!

Well there are really three classes of stuff I do.

Software/OS related cleanup/install. Hardware Repair/Cleanup. And Data Recovery. Everything can be assigned to one of those three categories.

But I've found if you aren't somehow very specific while at the same time making it dead simple to find, people will still ask if you can do a certain thing, even if its on the site. It's kind of hard to do both.

If it helps, anything where I have to open up a laptop, or dirty ass PC case, I charge $40 to start.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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The narrow and long vertical layout is extremely unprofessional and unattractive for consumers. If you follow Web 2.0 guidelines, you'll end up with something much more appealing and much easier for the users to navigate :-/

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"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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The narrow and long vertical layout is extremely unprofessional and unattractive for consumers. If you follow Web 2.0 guidelines, you'll end up with something much more appealing and much easier for the users to navigate

What is that? Random boxes with ad's, animations, and "like", "+1", and "reddit" buttons strewn about?

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Anomie
Member #9,403
January 2008
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Web 2.0 guidelines

What is that? Random boxes with ad's, animations, and "like", "+1", and "reddit" buttons strewn about?

I Googled and found this, which offered many lulz. :P

That said, the design looks like it follows most of this much more legitimate-looking guide (though I admit I had no intention of following any 'web 2.0 guidelines'). Of the fifteen guide topics, it looks like I've covered everything but the stupid crap ("reflections", "cute icons" and "star flashes"). The layout is a super-simple, central, single-column layout (or double-column, if you consider table columns as layout columns) that makes use of a clearly divided header section, big, bold text, strong color(s), even subtle gradients.

Well there are really three classes of stuff I do.

So are you open to trying to express that stuff in a way other than the list of 'term-exposition' pairs?

______________
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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What is that? Random boxes with ad's, animations, and "like", "+1", and "reddit" buttons strewn about?

Not even close. Try again.

Anomie said:

looks like I've covered everything

Not really. Websites crafted for the sole purpose of advertising a service should never be designed in a plain, narrow, long-vertical fashion.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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Could you stop making blanket statements without explaining them.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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Anomie said:

So are you open to trying to express that stuff in a way other than the list of 'term-exposition' pairs?

So long as its easy to understand, and clear on what things I actually do, yes. I'm ok with anything.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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Could you stop making blanket statements without explaining them.

Sorry, was that a question?

It shouldn't be too hard to infer that, although Anomie's design is pleasing to the eye, it won't have as good of a conversion rate as a design that followed modern product-site guidelines.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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Muh, you're not making any sense so I should just ignore what you're saying.

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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Jesse is right, but if you view the full size version of the screenshot, it's not really that far off. I think the worst aspect of it is that the services page is just too long and boring.

Even if it's accurate, most people don't read anything. The average person just wants to know whether or not you can fix computers... I'd tend to break it down into just a few things:

  • Clean viruses (i.e., make a computer run faster)

  • Build new computers

  • Upgrade computers (add more "memory")

  • Software training / tutoring

Nobody is going to think "my computer case needs to be cleaned." Each of those four things could be a large "icon" image in a 2x2 pattern, or something like that. As little text as possible. If somebody happens to click on one of those things, then it could take them to a page explaining some of the services in more detail (not that anybody really cares).

Regarding the pricing page, simple is good. In fact, if $30 is your lowest price, then I'd not even mention the $40 price point. The goal is to get people to call / email you. That's when you can explain exactly what the cost will be.

Edit: The first website I just checked out:

http://www.geeksquad.com/

Ignore everything but the home page, since obviously they do tons of things. But note how the services are very simply laid out without overwhelming amounts of text to read.

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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There, a nice explanation like that goes a lot further than a random statement with nothing backing it up.

Felix-The-Ghost
Member #9,729
April 2008
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Anomie,

Try putting the "names" or "types" of services above the corresponding descriptions (instead of to the left of it in a bolder face and see what it looks like.

==========================
<--- The ghost with the most!
---------------------------
[Website] [Youtube]

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