Today, at the time of this writing, Google posted a blog stating they were dropping support for old browsers. They stated:

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.

I made a case to move in the same direction at my company less than a month ago. I reviewed the visitor statistics and discovered less than 10% of all visitors to our sites use Internet Explorer. Months ago, Digg posted a blog asking whether they should block Internet Explorer 6 from viewing the site. Their statistics represented similar numbers to our own.

People are creative. It’s a fact of the state of humanity. People want to make things. It’s built into the human condition. But there is a difference between haphazard creation and focused, goal-oriented development.

Andy Rutledge states that creativity is not design. I agree with him. Creativity alone does not solve problems. Creativity, when allowed free reign, is as much a destructive force in business projects as it could be a productive partner.

Creativity can be a great driver for new ideas, but when creative focus remains the primary focus, the end product is bound to suffer. Web sites can prove a noteworthy breeding ground for creative direction overriding good problem solving.

When given a task of making search terms and frequetly visited pages more accessible to users, the uninitiated fire and fall back. They leave in their wake, broad, shallow sites with menus and navigtion which look more like weeds than an organized system. Ultimately , these navigation schemes fail to do the one thing they were intended for, enhance findability.

Though one of my latest projects was the final straw, prompting this post, I’ve seen teams approach sites with the goal of findability and navigability in mind, only to end up with a system of menus and a field of links that are almost impenetrable to even the most tenacious of webonauts. Documents, pages and external links mingle in a taxonomic and architectural nightmare.

Perceived site architecture is to blame for this iniquity, regardless of the real information hierarchy. Although broad and shallow architecture is fine for small, simple sites, it is unforgiving as the site grows and the number of pages needed to contain all of the information provided balloons up.

Most content on the web is managed at the page level. Though I cannot say that all systems behave in one specific way, I do know that each system I’ve used behaves precisely like this. Content management systems assume that every new piece of content which is created is going to, ultimately, have a page that is dedicated to that piece of content. Ultimately all content is going to live autonomously on a page. Content, much like web pages, is not an island.

Six months or a year ago, I had an epiphany. Content can be handled much like programming, i.e. in an object-oriented manner. Web sites often have repeating elements which could be broken out into individual pieces and reused throughout the site. These pieces could be considered objects in their own right, and they would share quite a bit with objects in programming. After building a proprietary Content Management System around this concept, I coined the phrase “Object Oriented Content.”

Nothing like a nod to the reverse mullet to start a post out right. As I started making notes on a post about findability, something occurred to me. Though it should seem obvious, truly separating presentation from business logic is key in ensuring usability and ease of maintenance. Several benefits can be gained with the separation of business and presentation logic including wiring for a strong site architecture, solid, clear HTML with minimal outside code interfering and the ability to integrate a smart, smooth user experience without concern of breaking the business logic that drives it.

The benefit that engineers will appreciate is the ease of maintainability. With business logic abstracted from the presenation, engineers can maintain the infrastructure without worrying about breaking the look and feel of the client experience. This alleviates stress and sleepless nights they might experience otherwise.

User self selection is a mess. Let’s get that out in the open first and foremost. As soon as you ask the user questions about themselves directly, your plan has failed. User self selection, at best, is a mess of splash pages and strange buttons. The web has become a smarter place where designers and developers should be able to glean the information they need about the user without asking the user directly.

The innate problem with asking the user about what they want is, they will invariably give you the wrong answer. Sometimes it happens because they don’t know what they want. Sometimes they don’t care. Sometimes they misunderstand what you really want to know and sometimes they flat out lie to see what happens.

The question has hit my desk a few times now, “how does the user self-select in a nice, fluid manner?” The answer: they don’t.

Every time I wander the web I seem to find it more complicated than the last time I left it.  Considering this happens on a daily basis, the complexity appears to be growing monotonically.  It has been shown again and again that the attention span of people on the web is extremely short.  A good example of this is a post on Reputation Defender about the click-through rate on their search results.

I was discussing these two aspects of the web with the graphic designer at my work and we seemed to agree that all evidence points to the growing trends of complexity and short attention spans. Then we had something of a revelation. Perhaps there is a correlation. Is it possible that the ever increasing complexity of the web and the numerous sites which live there are encouraging the limited attention of users? Perhaps it’s the other way around and short attention spans affect choice to add extra elements to an already architecture-overburdened site.

It’s been a while since I last posted, but this bears note. Search engine optimization, commonly called SEO, is all about getting search engines to notice you and people to come to your site. The important thing about good SEO is that it will do more than simply get eyes on your site, but it will get the RIGHT eyes on your site. People typically misunderstand the value of optimizing their site or they think that it will radically alter the layout, message or other core elements they hold dear.

First, what SEO isn’t. I think it’s best to get this out of the way early so we can get into helping you do good stuff without a bunch of “but-but-buts.” So, SEO isn’t cramming a bunch of keywords into the bottom of your page. It also isn’t redesigning your entire site so it looks like garbage but Google can read it like a dream. SEO is not putting your site on every link farm in the world and it is not spamming people on social networking sites. SEO is also not spamming people on message boards. SEO is not about fads and fast grabs. It’s not about people coming to your site and then bouncing immediately. SEO isn’t about a bad web experience, plain and simple.

I only post here occasionally and it has crossed my mind that I might almost be wise to just create a separate blog on my web server.  I have these thoughts and then I realize that I don’t have time to muck with that when I have good blog content to post, or perhaps it is simply laziness.  Either way, I only post when something strikes me.

Oh, and strike me it did.  Today I was hit with a brick by some guy running a site all about that crazy thing called love.  Lies!!  It was all about the web.  More importantly, it was about how to do various things on the web.  The site is called “The Noodle Incident” (http://www.thenoodleincident.com/) and, though it was not my favorite site to visit, I wasn’t terribly bugged about it.  Let me say, I wasn’t bugged until I got to the design page.  Finally, I’d had enough.

It’s been a while since I have posted. I know. For those of you that are checking out this blog for the first time, welcome. For those of you who have read my posts before, welcome back. We’re not here to talk about the regularity (or lack thereof) that I post with. What we are here to talk about is supporting or not supporting browsers. So first, what inspired me to write this? Well… this:

We Don’t Support IE

So, this brings a question to mind – which browsers should we choose not to support and for what reasons?

This is an easy question to answer.  You support all of them.  Yep, you heard me right.  You support everything.  You are mindful of browser incompatibilities, inequities, disabled users, mobile users and users you had never even thought of before.  You are aware of the fact that browsers come in multiple versions and you make your sites backwards compatible.  Long and short, do not tell your users what to do.