Quote:
Originally Posted by BNS
just because shitty looking site made you money in 90s, it doesn't mean it will do again.....
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That is my point about CSS. There is such browser and device incompatibility that it is practically impossible to make a site that is not "shitty looking" on some machines if you use CSS. Take LOR for example. Despite G's modesty it is a good looking site. However if you look at the thread where he talks about adding a slide in menu to the site, you will see it now only looks good on some devices and some operating systems. On others (eg XP/IE8) it is (sorry G) a "shitty looking site".
On XP/IE8 you get confronted by three non working buttons and an ugly menu dump. Worse, because the menu dump is the same on all pages, if you click a link "above the fold" the page appears not to change (it does change, but you have to scroll several screens worth down to see the change, most people won't realise this and will assume the page is fucked).
This means G is loosing, by his figures, $1 out of every $40 he could be making (Google disagree, their figures put it at about 20%, which is $8 out of every $40).
Worse, people will be talking about it. One XP user tweeting "Don't bother with LOR - it no longer works" will stop dozens of their followers even trying to visit the site, loosing him surfers who could ironically see the site perfectly on their Windows 8 machines, but who now don't bother because their XP using friend told them the site was as good as dead. Add on to that a few good re-tweets by people with plenty of followers, and G could be loosing thousands, possibly tens of thousands of surfers.
On top of that, I have been told (although PC says this is "old news") that Google lower the ranking of sites that are not IE8 compatible. Which, from this thread alone, you can tell will not make G a happy boy.
All this hassle because G used CSS instead of pure HTML. Is it worth it?