Digg.com recently went through a design update with their website, and it looks like they’re running into a few bumps in the road. I would just like to remind people that testing is a vital part of web design, but if you don’t give enough lead time to do the proper tests you’re going to run into a lot of problems. Just think of the variables out there that exist for your lowly web programmer, and these are only the most popular ones and not the 1% usage ones:
- IE8
- IE7
- IE6, and as much as we would like to kill it, with companies like Ford, Disney and Toyota still running it, its pretty hard to escape.
- Firefox
- Safari
- Chrome
- iPhone
- Android
- Javascript
- Flash
- Bandwidth
- 1024×768 Monitors
- 1920×1440 Monitors
Beyond web programming there are plenty of other things that can affect the uptime of your website.
Even if your code is sound you can always run into external problems outside the realm of a web designers problems. Remember that even though they may work everyday on a computer means that they know everything that surrounds computers from e-mail, servers, networks, or hardware. Imagine asking Slash to fix your piano, just because he plays an instrument doesn’t mean he knows ever
User Testing is the hardest to predict out of all of them. You can plan and design around UX (User Experience) but you can never expect what you can hear from tech support horror stories. The best stories are ones that are based on just a general lack of knowledge, but don’t dumb down your site for that 1% that probably couldn’t tell you what time of day it is anyways.
“My Cup Holder seems to be broken”
So even though you can’t predict how things are going to break, at least you can give the people an interesting 404 error page just in case.
