Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Special for Designers: Resolution, Browser, and OS Market Share Data for Last Month

October 19th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Ever wonder just how many people use IE 6, and why you should support it?

Well, look no further.

I’m a data junkie and I thought I would do a quick post to get the word out to all of our web designer followers about the percentages of people who use various configurations.

This data is all from last month. The three sources are all linked here. The methodologies differ in all three data samples but this will give you at least a general idea of what the popular things are.

And yes, IE 6 is still very popular.

Screen Resolution Market Share

Screen Resolution Market Share


Screen Resolution Market Share
1024 x 76830.60%
1280 x 80020.10%
1280 x 102411.49%
1440 x 9009.06%
1680 x 10505.80%
800 x 6003.69%
1152 x 864 2.56%
1366 x 768 2.29%
1920 x 12002.22%
1280 x 768 1.81%
All others10.38%

Browser Market Share

Browser Market Share

Browser Market Share
IE 6
24.42%
IE 7
19.39%
IE 8
19.14%
Firefox26.08%
Safari3.74%
Chrome3.17%
Opera1.53%
All others
2.53%

Operating System Market Share

Operating System Market Share

Operating System Market Share
Windows XP
68.49%
Windows Vista
22.39%
Mac OS X
4.59%
Linux0.95%
All others
3.58%

Did anything surprise you?

Headlines - Balancing Google and Accessibility

October 2nd, 2009 posted by Josh Lasdin 12:08PM | View Full Story

This past week Xander and I got into a fairly heated debate regarding the use of headlines in sections of a page other than the main content (i.e. Sidebars, Footers, etc.).

fight

We each came at the problem from a different angle, but soon found that we were searching for the same end-goal. This meant it was time to put the baseball bats and brass knuckles away and come up with a solution. We knew what we wanted our pages to accomplish:

  • Full accessibility to all users
  • Easily indexable content for Google
  • Meaningful, semantic mark-up

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23 Questions to Answer Before a Website Redesign

September 18th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Yay!

I don’t think I’ve linked to Seth Godin yet on this blog, which is insane. He’s a genius and a big influencer on the way I think (and the world thinks) about marketing and business. I’ve fallen off of reading his blog, but while researching ideas for this post he popped into my head.

So I went there and BAM! An invaluable post, right at the top.

The title: Things to ask before you redo your website. You won’t find “Which color palette should I use?” or “How many columns?” on here.

The most important one:

What is the goal of the site?

Just making a mission statement for a business, deciding on a website goal up front makes littler decisions much easier.

  • Want to maximize traffic? You need a mobile site.
  • Is it sales leads? You should be tracking calls.
  • Is it targeted to your best customers? Ignore everyone else.

Answer the big question first, and the little ones fall into line.

Before a website redesign project starts, have a team meeting to discuss Seth’s suggestions first. It will benefit everyone involved.

P.S. Seth’s a magnificent writer, one of my idols in terms of style. Some other greats: Penelope Trunk, David Ogilvy and Winston Churchill. If you can learn to communicate like them your ideas will become clear and memorable.

Email Marketing: What Century are We In?!?

July 31st, 2009 posted by Josh Lasdin 12:08PM | View Full Story

old-emailEmail Campaigns and Blasts has been popping up more and more often with a number of our clients. As you know we’re HUGE advocates of modern, fresh design and clean, standards-complaint code. Sending HTML emails is just like building a webpage right? Wrong. In this post I’ll go over some of the big hiccups we’ve run into, and ways we skirt around them.
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The Top 5 Awful Site Designs That Amuse the WebpageFX Office

April 24th, 2009 posted by Xander Becket 12:08PM | View Full Story

Terrible Site Design

Every once in awhile a really awful site design comes along and makes you laugh, cry, or want to punch your monitor.

You find these sites quite often when you work at a web developer. We share them amongst ourselves and share a laugh.

Here’s a list of the top 5 worst website designs we’ve seen, in order from bad to worst.

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Extra! Extra! Our Blog Looks Like a Newspaper!

April 3rd, 2009 posted by Josh Lasdin 12:08PM | View Full Story

post-imageAs I mature as a designer I’m seeing more and more the great importance of doing some research before jumping into a design. A classic example of this is our very own blog (yes, the one you’re reading right now!).

The planning that went into creating this blog was probably a lot more than one would expect. Xander and I sat down one fateful sunny afternoon (we won’t discuss how cold it was outside) and discussed what we wanted to accomplish with the blog, who our target was, how we would reach them and still push the envelope for inspirational creativity.

We boiled it down to two options: we could focus on just utilizing our blog to gather links and boost internet presence, or we could create a design that would mix the blogging world with traditional newspapers. The latter built a better argument. A large number of our clients (consequently also our target market) aren’t you’re typical “Blog Readers”, so our angle would be to try and bridge the gap between something they were comfortable with: reading a morning paper over some hot java, and something we were comfortable with: pining over blog posts looking for the latest tips and tricks.

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