"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                 July 16, 2000

In this issue: 

"About mid-year every year I conduct a statistical 
study of our own site's traffic and also look at 
published reports of browser usage. You may be
interested in what I found this year because it
signals we're about to be able to make a big step 
up in interesting things to do on a web site."

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The way we design a web site is determined to a large extent
by the capabilities of the browsers with which we expect
people to view it. It would be great to be able to use all
the latest technology to produce exciting, beautiful sites
and to do it more easily as well. Unfortunately that would
leave a large percentage of the site's visitors staring at
unintelligible garbage because their browsers wouldn't
support all those nice features.

We can detect what kind of browser a visitor is using and
make some adaptations to what they have. If you're a
mega-corporation you can afford to build a version of every
page tailored specifically to each kind of browser and shunt
them to it as appropriate. If you're not a mega-corporation
we have to be a bit more realistic.

The first goal is to make sure that almost all your visitors
will see something useful and attractive. I say "almost all"
because doing it for every old and odd browser out there
gets you into mega-corporation territory right away. We have
to make a cut and say something like "We'll handle 95% of
all visitors browsers gracefully" or some similar figure.

Then we have to get statistics on browser usage and figure
out which ones we need to accommodate and how to make the
site degrade in a graceful and unobtrusive way for the
less-capable ones. 

For the last few years that's meant not using new things
like CSS and DHTML (I'll define these in a minute) and
building pages that may use Javascript but only showing it
to Netscape version 3.0 and later or Internet Explorer
version 4.0 or later. For the earlier ones we make sure the
site works without the Javascript. We do use things that the
oldest or oddest browsers can't handle, but only if we know
that those browsers in total amount to under 5% of all
traffic.

About mid-year every year I conduct a statistical study of
our own site's traffic and also look at published reports of
browser usage. You may be interested in what I found this
year because it signals we're about to be able to make a big
step up in interesting things to do on a web site.

I analyzed the browser-type statistics from the last 15,000
hits on our site (http://siderealdesigns.com) and this is
what I found:

Other Agents      32.79%                     
MSIE v5.X         26.77%
Netscape v4.X     21.20%
MSIE v4.X         15.17%
Netscape v3.X      2.11%
MSIE v3.X          1.45%
WebTV              0.29%
Netscape v2.X      0.08%
Lynx               0.06%
MSIE v2.X          0.05%
Netscape v1.X      0.02%
Netscape v8.X      0.02%

The "Other Agents" category is almost all the spiders or
robots of search engines visiting to catalog the site. This
corresponds well to official estimates that they amount to
about a third of web traffic.

Taking these out since they don't count for our purposes, we
have this breakdown:

V3.0 and better (72.72%) = 99.30% of all browsers
V4.0 and better (69.18%) = 94.47% of all browsers

This means that currently, at least at our site, very close
to 95% of all visitors are using version 4.0 or better of
either Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer. 

That's exciting news because those browsers are capable of
handling sites that use dynamic HTML (DHTML) and cascading
style sheets (CSS.) The reason that's good is that we can do
a lot of interesting, visually-impressive, and even useful
things with those techniques, but older browsers that can't
use them will just see chaos on a site that uses them. 
Worse, there's no practical way to make it degrade gracefully 
for them, and so we haven't been using these on our client's
sites.

But it seems we're about to be able to start building sites
using these techniques in the confidence that "almost all"
of their visitors will have a pleasant experience. I think
probably by this Fall we'll be firmly in that position since
some new releases of the major browsers are scheduled, and
many people will upgrade.

Some of the interesting things that will become available
include ways to use motion, dynamic changing of properties
such as color and also importing any font we want from the
site to a browser that doesn't have it. The bottom line is
going to be a lot more "sizzle" that's going to raise the
bar for web sites that want to grab and hold attention.

You'll hear some pundits maintain that content is
all-important, and in one sense that's true, but you have to
convince people to stick around and look at it and marketing
studies consistently show that appearance is key to that. As
the technology advances, so people's expectations advance and
sites that were once seen as sophisticated come to be seen as
cheap or lacking in polish.

Along the same lines, streaming media is already much in
evidence on the web and is about to be "the next big thing"
in terms of broad adoption. Basically that means live audio
and video, sound-synched slide shows, and other
attention-getting ways of delivering your message with
maximum impact. It could, for example, allow you to present
an audio tape directly over your web site instead of sending
the visitor to a "podium line" or selling them a cassette.

We're about to be offering some new things we have under
development at our own secret experimental web site for
installing streaming media cheaply.  We'll devote another
newsletter to explaining the available options and benefits
for streaming media shortly.

Best,

Jamie

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"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
or pertaining to the stars, the heavens, etc."


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Sidereal Designs, Inc. "Making The Web Simple."   http://siderealdesigns.com