Warmest Greetings,

:: Monday, December 15, 2003 ::

Last week I liberated my laptop and installed Mozilla Firebird and the even less painless email client, Thunderbird. I haven't used MS Outlook since 2001 and haven't missed it. Eudora for email is fantastic (and I still use it on another PC) but I was in the mood to try something new, especially since my parents converted and raved about Mozilla.

Meanwhile, one of my programming buddies who refused to give up NS4.7 finally did when he retired his laptop and bought a new one. He loves NS7.1. But he still needs to test an application on NS 4.7, a browser I keep on my main testing PC for test purposes. A quick spin today of an application showed it flunked Mozilla and Opera, but worked in MSIE 5.5. I haven't tested it in NS4.7 yet, but if memory serves, the builders don't care if it works there.

As we near another new year, one thing has remained unchanged since I became an Internet addict in 1995. Browsers, and which ones to build for. Not only this, we have to build web pages search engines will find. Cre8asiteForums Tech Admin, "Grumpus", has launched an interesting thread called That Browser You Forgot To Design Your Website For. He writes:

"Nowadays, people often forget that the choice needs to be made. "I want my site done completely in Flash with sounds and buttons that scroll out onto the screen because it's cool!" and in the next breath "I want to rank #1 for the search term of Blue Widgets".

The above is the equivalent of saying, "I want frames on my site because it keeps the site navigation there in one place." Next breath: "My site sells Blue Widgets to AOL customers." Unfortunately, at that time, it was simply impossible. "

Birth. I made my debut post today in the new Search Engine Roundtable, and included some new nifty tools for colors and fonts.


Rebirth. Remember the search engine Northern Light? It's making a comeback as Northern Light Business Research Library

"NL is positioning the product as a usable, affordable, and effective alternative to the general Web search engines, which often provide irrelevant or dubious results and are dominated by e-retailing, and the expensive commercial services, such as Factiva, LexisNexis, and Dialog. "

Congratulations to a new member of the Cre8asiteForums moderatating team. Taking a member's suggestion to heart, we've begun a new topic area devoted to CSS, Style and Positioning because there's such a strong interest there. Helping our "Adrian" as a co-moderator is one of our regular members known as "Tam". You can read more and meet her here.

Don't think usability matters to the bottom line? Consider this. We have a thread running in Cre8asiteForums about low budget ecommerce merchant accounts and online buying setups. One site was recommended, of the several, that received great feedback until someone realized there was no customer contact phone number for them to call. He writes, "I cannot bring myself to do business with a company that does not offer a telephone number which one may use for contacts. Otherwise, the service/company would be appealing to me."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 12/15/2003 12:40:59 PM

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