Introduction

Several years ago, I put together a fairly stream of consciousness rambling about the lessons learned putting together my photographic web site.  That article can be found at www.butzi.net/articles/website.htm.  It was originally written in August, 2000.  I've updated it several times, mostly to make the statistics more current, but there have been no real substantive changes in the content.

In 2004, I wrote an update to that article.  The update can be found at www.butzi.net/articles/website2.htm.

Now, it's April, 2006.  Time for another update

Changes in the WWW

The WWW continues to evolve.  In 2004, much of that evolution was in the form of new browsers, and new technologies like Flash, DHTML, etc.

Since then, the dramatic changes in the WWW have been changes in what I'll call demographics:

• Speed of connection - many more viewers of websites are now using broadband connections. 

• Screen size - in 1998, when I first lauched this website, the vast majority of viewers were using screens that were 640x480.  In 2004, that had changed and the majority of viewers were using screens 800x600 or larger.  In 2006, this has changed yet again.

Connection speed

Depending on who you believe, and exactly how the statistics are drawn, somewhere between 50% and 90% of the visitors to my web site have 'fast' connections.  As time goes on, that figure will asymptotically approach 100%.

Now that something like a majority of people view web sites over 'fast' connections, the pressure to minimize bandwidth use has fallen off dramatically, and it will continue to do so as broadband penetration improves.

This means that people are less interested in techniques like thumbnailing, where a set of small images are presented and the user can click on one to see  a larger version of the image.  You'll note that in the newer portions of this web site, I've abandoned thumbnailing, although I'll continue to experiment with it for purposes of building galleries which hold large numbers of images.

It also means that it's becoming feasible to have websites which are much more graphics intensive - with graphics for headers, footers, menu buttons, etc. not being things which slow the web site down.  I plan on doing some of this, and also working to illustrate the text only portions of this web site with photographs.

The bottom line here is that folks are expecting bigger images, without thumbnails, and they're expecting web sites which are graphically richer than what was preferred 2 years ago.

Screen size

Here are the screen size statistics from the past month for this web site (as reported by www.statcounter.com):

Size	Percentage
unknown	10.98%
640x480	0.01%
800x600	7.01%
1024x768	41.79%
1152x864	4.65%
1280x1024	31.87%
1600x1200	4.65%

Now, there's some question about the distribution of sizes in 'unknown' category, but some of those unknown sizes are folks like me: my screen size is 2560x1600.  It's probably safe to assume that 90% of all viewers are using screens larger than 1024x768. As a result, it makes sense to lay out your web pages using that as the smallest usable size.  I expect that in the next year, most of the 800x600 screens will be gone, too. 

This is good news, because it means that there's a lot more room to display photographs - essentially, the maximum displayable size for a photo is what will fit on your web page without forcing scrolling when the web page is maximized on a 1024x768 screen.  It varies depending on which browser the viewer is using, but that works out to a usable display space of about 950 x 600.  If your web site was designed for displays 640x480, it's way past time for an update.  If your website was designed for 800x600, it's time for an update.  If you were on the bleeding edge and laid things out for 1024x768 - at last, your hour has come.

From now on, the challenge is to lay out your website so that it does not look stupid when viewed at arbitrary, large window sizes.  Trust me, most web sites look stupid when viewed full screen on a 2560x1600 monitor.  That's ok, I never browse in a full screen window, anyway.

Browser demographics

Based on www.statcounter.com statistics for the past month on this web site, roughly 60% of the viewers are using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0.  About 14% are running Safari 1.2, and about 13% are running Firefox 1.5.0, 5% Firefox 1.0.7.  The remainder are scattered across a wide variety of browsers.

This means that you need to ensure that your website works properly under the three leaders: MS Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox.

The good news is that you can now assume that, with the exception of people attempting to browse your web site from cell phones, virtually every viewer is using a CSS capable browser.

Global Reach

The internet in general and the WWW in particular are increasingly becoming global. 

According to statcounter.com, in the past month, this web site has been visited from (in order of decreasing frequency) : United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Czech Republic, South Africa, Switzerland, Republic of Korea, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, Hungary, Argentina, Greece, Thailand, Taiwan, Romania, Norway, Russian Federation, Turkey, Singapore, Mexico, Croatia, China, Chile, Trinidad And Tobago, India, Malaysia, Israel, Albania, Indonesia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Austria, Slovakia, Andorra, Kazakhstan, Slovenia, Brunei Darussalam, Oman, Ukraine, Venezuela, Lithuania, Philippines, Latvia, Pakistan, Viet Nam, Peru, Bulgaria, Serbia And Montenegro, Luxembourg, Kuwait, Qatar, Brazil, Cyprus, Malta, Panama, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria,  Islamic Republic Of Iran, Zimbabwe, Iceland, Macao, Estonia, and Uruguay.

That's 79 countries, scattered all over the planet. [For your further edification, there are 192 or 193 countries in the world (depends on who you ask).  So my little website has reached 40% of them IN THE PAST MONTH.  I have a way to go!]

Search Engines

Here's the breakdown of hits delivered to this website in the past month by the various search engines (stats are again from www.statcounter.com):

Perc. Search Engine 89.65% Google 6.32% Yahoo! 3.53% MSN 0.31% Earthlink 0.19% AOL UK

Yow.  90% Google.  It's actually larger than that, a large fraction of the Yahoo numbers are actually hits from the Yahoo directory, and not through the Yahoo search engine.

Talk about a monopoly.

Javascript

Increasingly, it's becoming easier and easier for sites to do sensible things with scripts, like cascading menus or other things that mimic user interface elements that viewers are familiar with.

I used to worry that lots of people didn't have scripting enabled.  The statistics from this website (which uses scripting for rollovers, where things get underlined or photos change when you mouse over them) are that less than 1% of the viewers are running their browser with Javascript disabled.

Statistics from this site are that almost exactly 1% of the viewers don't have javascript enabled.  I try to keep the amount of the site that won't work with Javascript disabled to a minimum, but I go ahead and use features that use it when it seems appropriate.

New and Useful Stuff

I have some fairly sophisticated software that lets me extract useful information from the log files.

Lately, though, I've been using a service called StatCounter (see www.statcounter.com).  You sign up (there's a level of service which is free.  Still mighty useful, but free.  And if you pay some money, the utility of the service improves).

After you've signed up, they give you a little bit of code that you embed in every page of your website.  The code allows them to track the number of users who've visited your site, how many (and which) pages they've vistied, and loads of useful stuff (see all the statistics mentioned above).

Cost

Having a web site has never been cheaper.  There are outfits doing web hosting for US $5 per month, including domain registration.  That's with more disk space than you can use, and enough bandwidth included that you'll never run out.  I don't know what the service is like, or the performance, but it does give you some idea of just how cheap having a web site has become.

If all you want is a photo web log, there are boatloads of places that offer free blog hosting.

The Conditions Which Prevail

The World Wide Web has always been an evolving, emerging thing.  That's good news, and bad news.  If you've already got a web site, it means that in order to continue to draw people back to your web site, you need to continually update your site with fresh material - new articles, new reviews, new photos.  But you should be doing that anyway.  The rapid growth of the WWW means that your audience is larger and more globalized than ever before.

After letting this site go idle for a while, it had dropped off to the point where it was getting about 250-300 unique visitors per day.  After adding some new material, and doing some work promoting the web site, it's up to about 400-700 unique visitors per day.