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I dont’t remember where I read it, but it sounds good:
“80% of your time is waisted trying to make a website look good in Internet Explorer 6”.
In other words you make a website which looks the way it should in all serious browsers and you spend an amount of time, let’s say 20 hours. You need 80 extra hours to make the same website look OK in ΙΕ6.
OK, I think there’s a bit of exaggeration here. However for me the relevant percents are 50%-50%. It is too bad as well. I can accept the differences between browsers and the way they read code. I can accept each jobs includes parts which are not fun at all. But I can’t accept such a bad browser which makes your life more and more difficult. There at least 6 reasons why IE6 must die. (Really? I thought there were 600.)
I get this point. What I don’t get is who consists this 37% of users who still select IE6. Take a look at the numbers. The moment IE7 starts working there is a 60% of people who select IE6. This happened approximately 18 months ago. Why more than half of those users didn’t abandon IE6 for IE7?
That’s easy. People who didn’t switch to Vista or owned pirate Windows couldn’t upgrade Internet Explorer. Why these people don’t use a better browser such as Firefox, Opera or Safari? That’s difficult.
What makes it difficult is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Someone for whom the Web is a hobby or a minor part of his job. I ‘ll make an effort to explain what happens in their mind.
Some people don’t know there are better ways of using the Web. There must be a few but they do exist.
Some others know about better browsers but they are afraid to change/install a new one. There must be a few as well.
Some people who can’t drop their habits out.
Others (e.g. stubborn ones who still cling to IE6)
If I haven’t made a huge mistake, this list describes people who are not up to the latest trends in Web technology. This is not an accusation; it is a fact. An expert plumber or a great lawyer might have learnt to work a specific way when it comes to the Web. Isn’t it difficult? I am afraid it will take a lot of time to these people to make this indispensable change.
This post surely won’t be read by people who still use IE6 since this website is incompatible with it. I did this because I felt I owed it to do so, even though there could be arguments against my decision. I think IE6 will be here for some time. This is why someone should kill it.
...and we get burned. We count 59 dead people. Where is going to stop all this?
Half of Greece is on fire. When writing the 1st part I could never imagine such a catastrophe. How many more people will go down? How is gong to be the life of people who lost all their belongings? How are we going to carry on?
We spend each day watching TV and calling to our people who face the danger. “Is the fire near to you? Can you see it? Get in the car and go away. But please stay cool.”
I went out and saw our house burnt. I saw my grandpa building it. I saw everyone at the front yard gazing at the valley and listening to nightingales. The seemed so happy. Most of the people I saw are not here anymore. Our house remained intact. But we are not going to hear nightingales again. That’s for sure.
Then you come back. You think of others who suffer. You think of people who got burnt in their cars, in their houses, trying to escape the fire. Can you imagine it even for 10 seconds? Can you realize that you could be in their place?
How can you talk to those people? What to say? Void.
I know life is unfair. Try to live. You won’t have a second chance.
What I don’t know is how to punish people who provoke such a catastrophe. There are many of them. People who didn’t take precautions, people who were ignorant, people who put the fires on. Who should punish them? Would you? What ‘d you do? Destroy their belongings, kill them or kill their children?
What is yet to come? What if we need to leave our houses again? When is going to stop? How many more people are going to die?
The sky turns to black. At night burning mountains look like starry skies and trees like Christmas trees. This view could be beautiful. Pervert?
When you think of tomorrow something happens and you run for your life. When you forget present time you get overwhelmed by what you are going to see tomorrow. This is how time passes by. Back to the TV, back to the phone calls. Back to this burning ring around your neck.
Day by day the Web is becoming more approachable and open to people. Now almost anyone can have his own website without spending much money. Furthemore he can configure it the way he wants without too much effort. That’s good news. What comes next is how a website can become a really valuable tool.
Things are pretty simple when we are talking about e.g. a personal blog. Nonetheless, there is a wide range of professionals who can use the Web to promote their activities easier than ever before. These people need more than a standard solution. They need customed ones.
Before Web development there are several issues to be addressed such as:
How any activity is going to be presented?
Which part needs to stand out?
Visits are good. What comes next?
How a website becomes a source of earnings?
Such questions deploy non technical decisions. Is everyone capable of taking them? No. The Web is a vehicle which needs special treatment. Text and articles for example should be treated a different way than in a newspaper.
Similarly, there also some technical questions of great importance:
What is going to be the hierarchy of information?
What is going to be the aesthetical approach?
What is going to be included in the end? Is there a need for a lot of different components e.g. a forum or not?
Which piece of software is going to be used? Why?
This set of questions works seperately from the first group and afford all websites. Combining both sets and adding all the relevant issues becomes prominent the fact that any success is determined before the real development. Someone must be able to provide answers to the questions above. But who?
Who can answer such questions?
Let’s see first who can’t answer. By all means a business consultant is not capable to solve such problems. Most of the times people who are experts in business can’t tame the Web because they don’t know how it works. Usually, business practices cannot be applied to the Web. Here different things are required. On the other hand Web technicians very often are experts in a specific IT area whereas they can’t see the whole picture. As a result they get lost.
So, people who aim to give specific answers which will work need to have a good view of the Web as a whole, they must be able to create a strategy and to communicate effectively. At they same time they should know how to use modern technology, know the details of certain techniques and what is proper for a specific client. This is what I call Web culture.
Who are these people? Where are these people?
I don’t know. I may be able to count a few who live outside Greece. But in Greece?
In Greece someone looking for such a person would come to nothing I suppose. It doesn’t have to do much with how to find him but with the general idea that Web cultured people are considered non important. I tend to believe the same happens everywhere, not only in Greece.
How many companies would look for such people? How many CEOs and other consultants would sacrifice their ego in front of someone who would come and go? How many half educated technicians and managers would admit they don’t stand a chance when compared to these people? Almost none.
Things are getting even worse if one considers that Web cultured people should be fairly paid for their services. What does this “fairly” mean? I won’t answer to this - consider the width, the quality and the difficulty of the job and do the math.
However the gap still exists. Certain needs exist too. Reality shows that most of the websites fail. I am not talking about design or coding. I am talking about websites which have no reason to exist even if they have been designed by the best designers and coded by the best developers. I am talking about a holistic view of the Web and about people who are professionals or amateurs who want to act like professionals. You get my point.
Let me say a few words about Smashing Magazine: it is an online magazine which is relatively new. However, the quality of the articles it contains made it tremendously famous in a few months. It mainly covers issues about Web design and it presents excellent content such as beautiful websites, excellent software or handy scripts.
Being amongst the best was a great surprise for me and it also a good way to return to work after summer vacations. You need such fuel from time to time to carry on.
[Update] CSS Juice selects 20 weblogs with monochrome style. porcupine colors is one of them.
CSS Juice is another magazine which presents tutorials, code snippets and websites around CSS and not only. I was greatly surprised because I never mentioned my website to the magazine. What makes me even more happy is the fact that all designs are awesome. Thank you CSS Juice!
After 11 and a half months of hard work it’s about time for some vacations. Which means that this website will be be off for this week and the following one. I wish I had more time to rest and disconnect from all things which compose an everyday routine.
So until I come back, dear readers, I leave you with a few great links I recently discovered:
Reviving Anorexic Web Writing - If content is the king, treat it like this. A trully amazing article published in A List Apart about how to write for the Web.
design|snips - A web gallery about design details found in several websites.
The waves of creativity - Ever wondering what happens when you seek inspiration and creativity? In this article you won’t find everything about the subject, instead you will see how things start working in your mind.
A 404 error page is the destination reached by a visitor of a website who didn’t find what he was looking for. A metaphor: a driver follows a path and reaches a dead end. What comes next? He turns back. Fortunately things can be better in the Web.
There are several reasons why a visitor may be found in a 404 error page:
Because of a bad link.
Because of a mistake while typing in the address bar.
Because of a page which has been removed from the website
Users are one click away from leaving your website.
As a result, when a visitor comes to a dead end, his next action is most probably to go away. We don’t want this, right? Moreover, we do need to make our websites friendlier anyway. This is why our 404 pages should be more usable.
Actually, a 404 error page can be decorated the way we want. It is up to the designer. Some people include a link to the homepage, some others a search form and others the whole sitemap of the website.
You can take a look at my 404 error page. Notice that the link sends you to a lala.php page. Which doesn’t exist of course. So you are automatically driven to the 404 page. I tried to create a humorous one but it could be anything.
The idea is to make your visitor feel fine with your website even if he reaches a dead end. Just like a good road network should help drivers to find their way a website should foresee errors and help visitors find what they are looking for.
There are a lot more that could be mentioned about 404 error pages. Smashing Magazine holds all the details.
Half of Greece is on fire. When writing the 
Then you come back. You think of others who suffer. You think of people who got burnt in their cars, in their houses, trying to escape the fire. Can you imagine it even for 10 seconds? Can you realize that you could be in their place?
What is yet to come? What if we need to leave our houses again? When is going to stop? How many more people are going to die?
Let me say a few words about Smashing Magazine: it is an online magazine which is relatively new. However, the quality of the articles it contains made it tremendously famous in a few months. It mainly covers issues about Web design and it presents excellent content such as beautiful websites, excellent software or handy scripts.
[Update]