Why Web Sites Suck

You might add one more: "Don't make me choose among horizontal scrolling, making my window larger or simply leaving." Hint, hint, nudge, nudge. Say n'more.

cheers,

gary, who prefers to surf at 800px

Gotcha, any specific reason you use 800x600?

I can't speak for Gary, but I can tell you why I use a smaller UI window.

I use a two screen setup and have multiple applications open at the same time. I spread these across my screens to facilitate my work flow. I tend to use the internet primarily as an information resource and constantly swap between my browser and the application/s I am working on. I have no reason to use my UI at max screen size - in fact, that would be a waste of valuable screen real estate as far as I am concerned.

One of the big challenges of web based design, I believe, is we designers have no idea how the end user will use our products. And, the assumptions we make, based on our own proclivities, often risk driving users away from our products.

just my AUD0.02c worth

EDIT: I fixed a spelling error and this post moved out of it's proper position - ie, 3 places upthread. Damn my pedantic nature.

Much like Phreestyle, I like to have multiple apps running and in view. It is quite common to reference one while working on another. If I could find one that didn't cost an arm and a leg, I'd have a 2560×1440px screen and run six 800×600px apps tiled with no overlap—Emacs, three browsers, xterm and a mail client.

More æsthetically, an 800px width allows for a comfortable 60–65 character column width plus a nav or whatever sidebar. Consider this site. The posts are more comfortable to read with the window at 800px than at the over-wide 1024px width, as the lines of text become overly long (though not as bad here as on some forums).

cheers,

gary

At the risk of taking this thread in a totally different direction I find it interesting to get an insight into other people's work style.

This is what I have running on my machine currently.

2 x virtual machines. 1 x wamp server with CMS. 1 x M$ 2K3 with IIS and Sharepoint.
1 x Graphic editing program
2 x adobe reader PDF files
1 x Firefox browser - multiple tabs (e-mail, FTP manager, general browsing, phpmyadmin )
1 x code editor (html kit)
1 x notepad (for roughing out ideas)
3 x folders (2 x external hard drives, 1 x image database)
1 x Task manager (the swap file is peaking out (I wonder why?). I think I need more RAM)

You guys must have a tough time browsing the web, as most sites are optimized for 1024. I know that is a terrible excuse on my part, as you have both made valid points, but as monitors become cheaper and larger, this is the way things are going.

In any case, that is something I should, and could consider for my site. I could probably just decrease the sidebar size. Anyway, thanks for the input.

ifohdesigns, like Phreestyle and gary, I don't use my browser full screen. For me the whole point of having a large screen is to put more individual windows on it, not to make one window bigger. I got myself a wide screen to have two reasonable width windows side by side. For me the WORST sin a website can do is to attempt to resize my browser.

Phreestyle, in answer to your earlier post.

1. All desktops. Adium (integrated IM client)
2. Desktop ... Camino. For actual web browsing, like this site.
3. Desktop ... Firefox (web development) / Dreamweaver (code view), iTerm

On one of 2 & 3 will have my email client and Colloquy (irc client).

Depending on work.

3 + Photoshop / RDP / CyberDuck (ftp client) / Smultron (text editor) / kcachegrind / MySQL GUI tools
4 Desktop. 2 x VMs for windows browser testing, mainly IE6 & IE7.
5 Desktop. Opera, Safari, browser testing.

My menubar enables me to monitor the health of the machine, with CPU utilisation, memory usage, CPU temp and fan rpm information.

How do you find W2K3 runs in a VM (on what spec machine)? I tried that for a while but felt it was painfully slow.