- AnalogWeapon
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- Exalted Heroic Member
Posted by: muffin man one
Well when you put it that way I can see your reasoning and I didn't mean to rattle any cages as it were. I just have heard the complaints and thought "Why not?" and I'm sure you can understand my point of view when the old layout was much easier to use. However I am glad that you are thinking of making adjustments so that it is easier to navigate. (although my gripe was with not knowing who made the post without having to scroll back and forth.) As far as the issue is concerned I am happy to stand down from my podium of sorts.
Oh, and I am sorry I missunderstood 'demographics'
Yeah, unfortunately when you're designing a website, you need to make a compromise and pick a size that will fit in the lowest resolution that you think your visitors will have. There's always going to be some users that will be "left out", but it's just a design choice that needs to be made. Really simple sites that just need to show text can be design with a "liquid" layout where the text will reflow dynamically according to the size of the window (i.e. no horizontal scroll). But sites like Bungie.net that require many menus and sections with detailed and specific functions, are nearly impossible to make liquid.
As far as the demographics go, it's nothing personal we're talking about. Through javascript and other languages, there are simple methods for determining what browser and OS a visitor is using, what their screen size is, etc. Any website that is half as big as Bungie.net will use a system to keep track of these things over time (All the websites I make have it, and they don't get anywhere near the traffic that Bungie does). These things are generally not connected to any personally identifiable data (i.e. They might know that 320 unique visitors to the site were using Firefox 2, but they won't have any idea what their name, IP address, etc is). This info is collected for one reason: To make the site work the best for as many visitors as possible.
Screen resolution isn't the only thing that needs to be taken into consideration when designing a website, either. Different browser treat the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in different ways. So those things are recorded also, again, in an effort to determine what is required to make the site nice for the vast majority of visitors. Believe me, it's every web developers' dream to have their web reports show that only 10 out of a total of 10,000 users visited the website with IE6 and a resolution of 800x600 last month... :)