| The Client Statistics Gatherer | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
One of the top rules of web design is to design your site to accomodate the wide range of screen resolutions that viewers may have. But this often places designers in a compromising position: when is it okay to sacrifice a little bit of usability to use more real estate? Which is better: for users to have to scroll more, or to have huge amounts of wasted space, resulting in many more page-clicks (and corresponding network/rendering delays) to get the same amount of information? And when is Jakob Nielsen going to lighten up, already?
When I first started designing this site in 1998, it was reported that nearly half of all web users (still) browsed at screen resolutions of 640 by 480. That translates to a LOT of pages for me, especially given the way I ramble. Okay, but what about my viewers? Indeed, there is an escape clause in the "design for the masses" commandment that stipulates you really need to design for your masses.
So how many of the viewers coming to my site are viewing at low-end resolutions? And while we're at it, what about color choices? Do I have to stick to the gruesome "safe 216", or do most of my users have 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit color palettes, allowing me more freedom to choose a pleasant off-white background that won't dither or look like rancid puke?
These, it turns out, are harder questions to answer than one might think. So, naturally, I did what any responsible web designer would do: I made up the answers to my liking.
But even after my conscience was beaten to a pulp by the more practical side of my mind, that even more annoying part of my brain that responds to "challenges" decided to step in. Surely there must be a way to get this data consistently, accurately, and unobtrustively, it kept screaming in my brain, often at the most inopportune times, like during sex. After a few weeks of trial and error, most of it spent whining about the fact that in the second largest software company in the world, I can't find a respectable JavaScript guru anywhere, I came up with the client statistics gatherer.