Web STATS for :  Smashing Time Web Design external website

Sample Period :  Sept 2004 week #3 
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Observations
  • We still get hits from Netscape 4 and IE 4 users (all first released around 1998) - our websites are tested and all work with these older browsers
  • Whilst IE 6 is a huge winner in the browser wars, IE 5 based browsers still make up a large proportion of hits - our websites are tested against this still very popular browser
  • Opera's use is increasing
  • Safari has just been released and we expect this statistic to increase over the coming months
  • The surprise this month is the resurgence of Netscape 4 browsers. Our staff noticed that some of the popular PC magazines had started to include Netscape 4.79 again on their free CD-ROMS. This may possibly be related to security fears about IE6 and IE5 or the large size and slow speed of later Netscape builds.

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Observations
  • As you can see the surprise is that even now the Windows 98 users still outweigh the latest Windows XP users. Our websites are developed under Windows 98 and tested across Win95, 98, ME, 2000, NT, XP, Mac OS and Linux
  • We still get hits from users using Windows 95
  • Mac visitors account for only a small percentage of web visitors (which makes it all the more strange that most Graphic Design companies build their clients websites on the Mac platform - we see many problems resulting from this approach) - we develop under the Windows platform and then fully test the website in various Mac operating systems and hardware combinations


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Observations
  • The key stat here is the 8 bit colour, this means that somebody tried to view our website with a graphics card that can only support 256 colours (as opposed to 65 million which is probably what you are using now). On average we get about 8 users a month using just 256 colour computers.  Our websites are designed to still be usable by these users, we don't need to compromise the design and colour, we just need to be conscious of the fact that with a tweak here and there even a 256 colour users will not be excluded from our websites

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Observations
  • We still get hits from users whose screens are 640x480 (possibly 14 inch monitors) and using only 256 colour resolutions - prior to delivery all our websites are tested at the lowest colour and screen resolution, whilst they may look a little crowded and dithered they ALL will work for this small percentage of web users 
  • The shift to the larger resolutions is self-evident

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Observations
  • Widespread acceptance of Javascript nowadays 

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Observations
  • Not every user has the Flash plug-in. Our websites are designed to work without the flash plug-in, they may not look as nice when it's missing but we don't exclude non-flash user from the website, many websites are not quite as understanding and without Flash you cannot proceed   

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Observations
  • Not every user has the shockwave plug-in. Our websites are designed to work without this plug-in, they may not look as nice when it's missing but we don't exclude non-shockwave user from the website

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Observations
  • Low take up of Real Audio 

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Observations
  • Low take up of Quicktime but not bad for a format originating in the Mac world (Macs only account for around 3-4% of the 600 million web users)

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Observations
  • Surprisingly low figure for Media Player when you consider it comes preloaded with the latest version of Internet Explorer


Why do we worry about these older systems, aren't they going to fade away soon?

The benefits of testing against all these old systems is that it makes us very careful to code to exact standards and to be conscious of the fact that some combinations have quirks that cause problems.

This means we build clever websites that wherever possible make use of the most widely available and adopted standards. The result is a website that is not only viewable by more visitors but it is also largely future-proofed; a good example of this is when Apple released their first web browser Safari

Safari is a strict standards based web browser and this caused millions of websites to be displayed incorrectly - primarily because they simply weren't built to the correct standards initially. Apple even had to make available a plug-in that allowed these poorly built websites to be accessed. We are pleased to say that due to our careful programming ALL our clients websites worked perfectly well under Safari saving our customers a fortune in potential website enhancements