Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/24/08 16:18

On 24 Jan, 15:31, "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4...@centralva.net> wrote:

> > Fixed pixel design has a long track record of looking gorgeous on the
> > developer's own screen, looking great in the pitch meeting, then truly
> > sucking when it hits the final user who has some different equipment.
> > So what are you going to do to your users in this situation? Turn
> > them away? (BTDT, seen the business fail as a result).
>
> No, you could have an army of assistants that will roam the world and
> for anyone that accesses the site without the prescribed dimensioned
> viewport on their device they would get the "V8-slap-in-the-head" and a
> laptop with the "correctly" dimensioned screen. Hmmm, how about to make
> things easier the laptops will only have IE on them!

I did _literally_ work on that site. It was the "owner's club" site
for T*sh*b* laptops, circa 2000. We "knew" what the screen size was,
because we knew the product line. We "knew" the browser (IE4) because
we knew what shipped on the default install.

It was the worst site I've ever worked on, built by the most clueless
web design company I've ever worked for. The finished site was a
disaster. Accordingly no-one used it. Even shipping out hardware pre-
wired to go straight to the site, it didn't generate traffic. Even
giving away freebie discounts to popular web retailers, it didn't
generate traffic. It couldn't have been more of a turkey if you'd
roasted it and shoved cranberries up it.

It also had the most inappropriate use of Flash for core navigation
that I've ever seen too.

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