Design, Screen resolutions and web pages
With this page, the different screen resolutions don’t make too much of a difference. Notice how there’s a scroll bar on the right? That means the visitor needs to scroll down to see some of the page.
Not everybody likes to scroll down a page.There’s a statistic that 50% of newspaper readers will only see the top half of the front page of the newspaper, simply because they’re too lazy to open it up.
This statistic remains true for Web sites a lot of visitors won’t look at anything past the top half of your page. What does this mean to you? If at all possible, scale down your page so it can be viewed on 800 × 600 screens. More than 35% of computers use 800 × 600.You really don’t want to annoy more than 1/3rd of your visitors, do you?
Scaling down your Web site isn’t too difficult.You just need to resize your tables to make the page smaller. For example, if you want to make the About Us page smaller, just make the company header at the top smaller and scale down the road logo. Suddenly, the page takes up a lot less space.
There are a few more aspects of compatibility we could cover, mostly involving operating systems and JavaScript. However, most operating systems display Web sites in the same way, and almost all browsers these days have JavaScript enabled, so it isn’t too big of a hassle.
There is one thing you should do, though. Always, and I do mean always, use the ALT attribute with the <IMG> tag to describe an image. Some visually impaired people have browsers that read the text on the page to them out loud. If your images don’t have the ALT attribute, these people won’t be able to hear the descriptions.
Also, some people still use text-only browsers, myself included. Without ALT tags, text browsers cannot understand images at all.The ALT attributes give some context to the images on the screen. Unfortunately, some sites don’t have the ALT attribute, which means that the images can’t be understood in a text browser like Lynx.