Is the Professional Look Really Better?

[Windsun]

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Thomas A. Rowe (e-mail address removed) wrote:
That is precisely what I said. You are either dishonest or a fool....

You really know how to make friends, don't you?

 

[William Tasso]

...
How about if you alt.www.webmaster guys snip the FrontPage forum from
your posts and we'll do the same from this end...

Leaving already? and we're only just starting to get cosy. oh well, pop
round anytime - the kettle is always on.

Where's Makrobicz when you need him

 

[GreyWyvern]

Or.. how about checking if you even CARE about Mozilla or other browsers?

I have let's say.. 20 hours a week to work on an e-commmerce website. I
can
spend that 20 hours each week updating products, adding more products,
and
generally making the site run better, products easier to find, for IE
only.
Or I can spend 80+ hours doing a make over to accomodate WebTV users,
that
constitute less than 1/2 of 1% of my hits.

Which has the better return?

Fallacy. For one thing, designing for "IE only" and then trying to
"accomodate WebTV users" is a pathetic Straw Man. WebTV users these days
are almost non-existant. Yet users of browsers other than IE now make up
a significant portion of the market, and have far better standards support
than IE. Designing a site to work in the Mozilla/Opera/IE triumvirate is
as easy as falling off a log. It's only when you start adding things
which only work in IE that make you believe coding for compatibility with
other browsers is an impossibility.

The problem is with the way you code, *not* the way "gentile" browsers
handle your much-IE-tested designs.

Grey

 

[Windsun]

Actually, yes

 

[Windsun]

Not sure what a tree divorce is, but it sounds REALLY bad....
[/QUOTE]

 

[GreyWyvern]

Can 4,239,488 Frenchmen be wrong?

Well, they *do* like eating the hind appendages of amphibians :/

Grey

 

[Windsun]

They eat Crocodile pen...??? oh never mind.....
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[Jim Cheshire \(JIMCO\)]

That's why you're still fiddling with templates and I'm doing
corporate and freelance design work. Yep, the world sure is unfair.

Trust me, you don't even want to go there.

--
Jim Cheshire
JIMCO
http://www.jimcoaddins.com

Now offering templates ranging from
affordable standard templates to
powerful e-commerce applications!

 

[Trevor L.]

What is this top/bottom posting controversy?

By top posting do you mean like this, where I ask OE to include the previous
message and then reply on top ?
And by bottom, does it mean what would result if I were to scroll down and
put the reply at the bottom ?

I have obtained OE-QuoteFix and I am now using it, but what difference does
it make?
I can see nice colours and indents on this newsgroup (not on plain EMail).
Is that what it is for, or does it do other things such as change between
top and bottom posting?

Personally I expect to see a reply at the top. When the reply isn't there,
it takes a bit of scrolling to find it. When the query and reply are
interlaced, it becomes even more confusing.

As to where my signature goes, I don't know. I put a sig into OE-QuoteFix
and I also have one in OE itself. I'll see if both come through.
--
Cheers,
Trevor L.

Personally, I detest bottom posting. I hate doing it, and even more I
hate reading it. It is a holdover from the dinosaur days of Teletype
machines where you read from the bottom up.

People are crappy about editing posts - how many times have you
scrolled down 5 pages to read some thing like "I agree"?

The most common "reason" given for bottom posting is that people read
what is being replied to, then the reply. But the fact is, 99% of us
have already read all that in the previous thread messages.

--
Cheers,
Trevor


I choose Polesoft Lockspam to fight spam, and you?
http://www.polesoft.com/refer.html

 

[Eric Jarvis]

IMO there's nothing that renders a site unprofessional as including head
shot of themselves on the site. I deal with this all the time with Realtors.
Don't they realize that showing a close-up of their scary-ass mutant Charles
Manson mug isn't going to help matters? Then the female half of the
population insist on posting up their high school photo taken long before
gravity, four children and tree divorces has taken it's toll. Isn't that
false advertising?

I don't know. I think that's beaten by some scrolling text telling the
visitor either something they already know (such as the date), or
something they really didn't want to know (such as the ambient temperature
in Akron Ohio). However I sympathise. It's not as if it shows anything
useful. If one could prove honesty and competence simply through a photo
then there would be a hell of a lot of human resources specialists out of
work. Come to think of it that might make the idea worthy of research, it
would be a long shot, but the results would be worth it.

 

[Eric Jarvis]

Or.. how about checking if you even CARE about Mozilla or other browsers?

I have let's say.. 20 hours a week to work on an e-commmerce website. I can
spend that 20 hours each week updating products, adding more products, and
generally making the site run better, products easier to find, for IE only.
Or I can spend 80+ hours doing a make over to accomodate WebTV users, that
constitute less than 1/2 of 1% of my hits.

Which has the better return?

Learning to do it right in the first place. You don't have to spend extra
time making the site accessible. You are spending that extra time fixing
the screw ups you did that blocked accessibility in the first place. Learn
not to make those foul ups and you have a generally accessible site that
you can add extra browser specific functionality for if you so choose.

However, you carry on doing whatever you like. Just don't try pushing the
line that you are doing a thorough and professional job when by your own
admission you are cutting corners.

Nobosy is saying you can't effectively hack together a botch job for IE
only using FP. However the original question was a much broader one of
choosing between results produced by FP and a CMS without any
specification of target audience. That's slightly different from
discussing the best way to work for a single browser.

My personal site currently runs at 17% Opera and Firefox. That's up from
12% or so six months ago. Not as rapid a rate of change as when IR pushed
Netscape off the number one browser slot, but the biggest shift since by a
LONG way. Add to that the fact that it tends to be power users who migrate
from IE and for a lot of sites Firefox and Opera are significant factors.
Then take a look at the way the mobile market is developing, because
that's the next big panic. Again there are a lot of sites where that's
precisely their target audience. A lot of us care about Mozilla.

Of course a lot of us also learned long ago how to build sites right in
the first place so that caring about different browsers isn't an
imposition.

 

[Windsun]

Wow, my first Web-Snob. I am impressed.

 

[Toby Inkster]

Out of 15,000+ unique visits this week, only 30 were from Opera. It's not
worth my time to redesign for that number of people.

Do you not think that's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I rarely have any conversations in Spanish -- even when I'm in Spain, so
it's not worth my while learning Spanish.

 

[Toby Inkster]

The main purpose of our website is to sell things. There are around 5000
products, many (probably most) which require some or a lot of technical
specs and text information. Not to mention the constantly (especially at
years' beginning) changing prices, availability, graphics, model
changes/add/deletions etc. Just taking care of that involves a lot of
time - probably 75% of a day's work. FP allows me to make changes fast
and easily.

Sounds like it severly needs a well-designed database backend.

 

[Norman L. DeForest]

Not sure what a tree divorce is, but it sounds REALLY bad....

gravity, four children and tree divorces has taken it's toll. Isn't that
false advertising?

[/QUOTE]

It's when you bark at your spouse too often so she leaves and you end up
out on a limb, pining for the good old days.

Coat? It's the green one, thanks.

 

[Jim Cheshire \(JIMCO\)]

Do you not think that's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I rarely have any conversations in Spanish -- even when I'm in Spain,
so it's not worth my while learning Spanish.

Is that really your logic? Amazing. There is a considerable amount of
educational and cultural value in learning another language. I don't think
redesigning a Web page that uses inline frames so that it renders well in
Opera even compares, but then that's just me.

--
Jim Cheshire
JIMCO
http://www.jimcoaddins.com

Now offering templates ranging from
affordable standard templates to
powerful e-commerce applications!

 

[William Tasso]

Is that really your logic? Amazing. There is a considerable amount of
educational and cultural value in learning another language. I don't
think
redesigning a Web page that uses inline frames so that it renders well in
Opera even compares, but then that's just me.

 

[Els]

That's a good reply to a toppost... ;-)

 

[Jim Cheshire \(JIMCO\)]

That's a good reply to a toppost... ;-)

Except that showing his true backwards thinking, he replied using that to a
bottom post.

--
Jim Cheshire
JIMCO
http://www.jimcoaddins.com

Now offering templates ranging from
affordable standard templates to
powerful e-commerce applications!

 

[William Tasso]

That's a good reply to a toppost... ;-)

ugh - so it is <g>

apologies one and all - clickety click frenzy while testing new (to me)
s/ware.