On 14 Feb 2004, at 9:00, Darrell King wrote:

> It's a great point and a touchy one!  I usually leave that
> decision to my clients, although I do try to provide them
> with information such as a guestimate of what percentage
> of their visitors will be of a mind similar to your wife.

Just make sure they're aware that it's a guestimate. 
Many people see a number and assume that it must be 
accurate! ;-)

> I also provide them with cost estimates for creating and
> maintaining multiple templates versus using one template
> and having the site degrade as gracefully as possible for
> NN4 (or other non-standard) users.

Like I said in earlier note, as long as the required 
functionality is there, that's OK. And someone else (I 
don't remember if it was on this list or some other one) 
pointed out that someone who uses an older browser 
probably has no idea what that site is "supposed" to 
look like (in a newer browser, anyway), so they don't 
care about what they might be missing unless they 
can't do what they want to do. Then they'll just go 
elsewhere and not come back.

> A really vague area is how many NN4 buyers would be lost
> because the site is only usable in NN4 instead of
> identical with current browser displays.

Actually that touches on the general idea - how many 
customers do you gain (or lose) due to usability issues 
(independent of browsers)? IIRC, Jakob Nielsen did a 
study awhile back that determined that usability had a 
great impact on sales at commercial sites. This is a 
hard thing to measure, yet has massive impact. (A 
simple case - at one time, AltaVista, Excite, and other 
sites were the great search engines. Then, over time, 
they decided to try to become more than search 
engines, and started throwing all sorts of stuff in 
people's faces (ads, offers of free email and IM, etc, 
etc). Google came along, and just gave you a simple, 
fast loading page with a search box on it. Very simple 
to use. We won't answer the question of which of those 
search engines are number one now. ;-)

> The final decision, of course, is based on whether the
> client thinks that the sales made to people like your wife
> will offset the increased costs of supporting the
> disappearing platforms.  In most cases, for most small
> businesses I have services, the answer has been no.  Some
> clients simply don't want to spend the money, others
> simply can not grasp that people won't see the site the
> way they do, others....well, you know the list of reasons
> as well as I do!

I also know that the bottom line for all of them is 
making money off their site. It's easy to mislead people 
using statistics - for example, sites that claim that 
browser such-and-such has only X% of market share. 
One must translate that into a real number - X% of the 
number of people using the internet - then see if they 
think that writing off that real number is as easy a 
decision to make. ISTRC an internet user base of 
something like 220-250 million. 1% of 250 million 
people is 2,500,000 potential customers in whose 
"faces" you may be figuratively "shutting the door". For 
a big place like Amazon, maybe 2.5 million customers 
isn't a lot. When I was running my own small business, 
I never even had close to that many potential 
customers! Make sure that the site is still attractive and 
usable despite degradation!!!!  

> Having a familiar, comfortable piece of software is a
> wonderful thing, but I predict that (MHO - YMMV) more and
> more people will be upgrading as the technology continues
> to roll onwards.  They will do so because the sites will
> look better,

Many users of older browsers have no idea that a site 
might look or work better in another browser. Their 
experience of a site is based on *their* browser, not 
someone else's.

> because new computers or other platforms will
> already be set up with the newer browsers (thus making it
> easer to just switch)

And unfortunately, for Windows users, that will probably 
be Internet Explorer, beloved of spammers, virus 
writers, and browser hijackers everywhere, and suffering 
from it's own "non-standards-compliant" state, too. ;-)

> and because people will keep encouraging them to. 

Really? I've only had one person encourage me to 
upgrade or change browsers - a friend who likes the 
blazing speed of the newest Mozilla and Firefox 
releases. I'm probably the only person who has ever 
mentioned (to my wife) the idea of upgrading her 
browser. She has seen and used IE5.5 and IE6, and 
still has no desire to budge from NS4.

> For us, it will be a Good Thing because coding for the
> newer standards is more logical, more flexible and gives
> us more options for both presentation and organization.

I agree with that! Although IMHO, CSS was invented for 
PROGRAMMERS, not web designers. It has a very 
logical/mathematical feel to it ... ;-)

> I love email - I can write a 2-hour monologue filled with
> self-importance and nobody interrupts!

Who are we to spoil someone else's enjoyment? ;-)

David
dvjones(at)ksbe.edu

> :)
> 
> D
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Jones" <dvjones(at)ksbe.edu>
> 
> 
> If you want someone at my house to buy something
> from your website, you better make it fully funtional for
> a NS4 user. My wife is by far the main web shopper at our
> house, and she won't give up her old familiar NS4 (running
> on Windows2000) for NOTHING! ;-)
> 
> 


 

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