My OperaHomepage Redo on the OmegaJunior.Net
Monday, December 12, 2011 11:45:02 PM
We redesigned the OmegaJunior.Net homepage. We went for easy to understand, easy to see, easy to use. And for HTML5, with obligatory rounded corners and gradients.
A lot of web pages are designed with a specific device in mind. My first computer was an Apple Macintosh: grayscale, 7inch screen. It could create colour, but it couldn't display it. The web site and art I created reflected that: colour blind psychadelica.
Then I was able to use colour CRTs, with bigger screens. Then came highly calibrated screens, and huge LCD ones.
And somewhere along the line, smartphones with tiny screens. Back to zero?
Until iPad. Bigger screen with finger touch sensitivity.
And at each turn, usability agents were claiming that most people used this or that screen size, so you should optimize your web site for that. And make sure visitors don't have to scroll. They were wrong. What screen size do you optimize for, now? Any? All? None?
With finger touch, rather than mouse pointers, buttons have to be bigger, with more space in between. But these browsers can and will zoom. A big button zoomed out can turn out smaller than a small button zoomed in. And people using small-screened browsers very quickly got used to scrolling.
So we take an intermediate approach: the page content has a maximum and minimum width, elements on it have a specific width allowing them to flow both next to each other and below each other, buttons look like buttons and work well for fingers and pointers alike, and new display techniques are used to keep the download size and network connections minimized.
We listen to today's usability and SEO agents and hope they got it right: our time for testing the benefit of one look and feel over another is limited. We tested the page for download and display speed and adjusted accordingly. And we tested in every browser we could get our hands on.
It's good. It's our best layout yet. With the best content to date. And it works in a lot of modern browsers.
That means we made a choice. Bye bye, decrepit browser. We will no longer waste our valuable time in trying to make things look good or work right in old, stubborn browsers. You will get a nice warning though, kindly advising you to get upgraded.
Go take a look: http://www.omegajunior.net/
