There are countless ways that the everyday consumer can surf the internet, and even more factors that determine exactly how it will look on their device.
What does this mean for businesses offering services like the ones we do – Web Design, Web Development and Web Marketing – considering all the devices out there?
Because no two computer set ups are quite the same, ensuring a website or application displays at its best for the majority of users has become an incredibly important and time-consuming process.
Here are just a few factors we, as Web Designers and Developers, need to take into account:
What Web Browser is the website being viewed on?
A Web Browser is the software application on your computer that is being used to view the website. The most popular Web Browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera and each have a slightly different way of displaying your website, and their own set of limitations.
Ensuring your website displays correctly across all of these browsers involves a lot of testing. On top of that, each browser has a number of versions (for example: Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9 – you get the idea!) that will also display the content differently and not every user will have the same version installed on their computer – phew!
A good web design and support team tests on all of the most widely used versions of these popular browsers and make appropriate changes to ensure your website displays correctly for the largest possible audience. It is a time consuming, but an integral part of the design process.
Browsers dimensions and aspect ratios
A website can be viewed on monitors and within browser windows of many shapes and sizes, so it’s incredibly important to design something flexible enough to work well across the board. Depending on the requirements of each of our clients, this can often take more planning time than most people realise.
Colours
Colours can vary depending on the brand and quality of the monitor (i.e. computer screen), the monitor’s brightness and contrast settings and lighting in the room. Also, if the website is being viewed on a laptop, considering the many angles at which the screen will be viewed can also be a consideration in the design process.
Of course, there’s not a full-proof way to cater for all these circumstances. At the end of the day, the colours you set will always vary slightly depending on how the website is being viewed, but it is something that a good web designer should take into consideration to ensure the colours they choose (particularly when dealing with greys) are not so similar to cause usability problems.
This is just a taste of the many factors your web design team must consider in User Compatibility; just one of the many stages in the process of creating a solid, efficient and user-friendly web application.
About Joelle
