[Sigia-l] 800 or 1024 - Which min. display resolution to buil d for?

[John McCrory]

Ziya > Could you talk a bit about the user agent/audience demographics
aspect of your site?

Happy to. I believe our data show that developing web applications for a
specialized audience of nonprofit and/or government folks no longer requires
one to expect users are using behind-the-curve computers and browsers, which
was a significant issue for us a couple years ago.

According to surveys of site visitors, our audience composition is:

   Nonprofit   37%
   Government  25%
   Education   18%
   Law Firm     5%
   Business     3%
   Media        2%
   Other+N.A.+ 10%
   no response

Given the large proportion of nonprofit and government users, I was really
surprised at how much the viewport and screen widths have grown.

When I looked at the user-agent and OS version breakdown in past years, I'd
noticed that our visitors seemed to 'lag behind' the general public
technologically; for instance, in 2003 I was seeing nearly a fifth of our
visitors still using Netscape 4.0x (in 2001 it had been slightly more than a
quarter); I discovered anecdotally that in many government offices at that
time, Netscape 4.08 was mandated as a "security precaution."

Data from the past two months on the user-agents our visitors are using
indicates our audience is more "up to date" than it used to be. Netscape
4.0x, which I started to see fade away in 2004, is completely gone. In fact,
only 1.4% of our visitors are using Netscape (all 7.1 or higher). But,
nearly 1 out of 5 visitors are (still) using a browser other than MSIE. Of
those people using MSIE, 98% are using version 6.0 or higher. Our browser
share figures now appear to be similar to those of several other
completely-unrelated sites I manage and to data I've seen from more
consumer-oriented sites.

Browser share:          OS share:
MSIE:    82%            Windows    93%
Firefox: 12%            Macintosh:  6%
Safari:   4%            Linux/Unix: 1%
Other:    2%

I wonder whether these figures seem more or less homogeneous than those of
other kinds of sites/audiences to SIGIA-L readers.

As mentioned before, about 99.7% of our human visitors have Javascript on.
Flash is installed on 99.3% of our human visitors' browsers -- up a tick
from 98.1% two years ago.

Finally, someone wrote to ask about the scripts I used to get the viewport
data. I've put them together with simple how-to use them notes for anyone so
inclined. Note that my method relies on being able to analyze web server log
files. 

    http://www.johnmccrory.com/miscfiles/visitor_viewport_data_how_to.txt

John

     John McCrory
     Webmaster
     Vera Institute of Justice
     233 Broadway
     New York, NY 10279
     www.vera.org
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