1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Design your web resource 177
All of this makes them untypical users. Most users have the
best equipment they can afford or the first machine they bought.
PCs are reasonably durable. They do not burn out like light bulbs.
They are not easy to sell second-hand, because the price and
specification of the new models keeps improving. Once people
make the big decision to buy a PC, many stick with what they’ve
got for a long time. There are too many other technology
products, such as mobile phones, PDAs, MP3 players, etc., pulling
the pounds or dollars out of their pockets. Many also feel
sufficiently technologically challenged not to consider free software
upgrades.
So designers should not design for themselves, but for the
users and their variable levels of technology. It is important to
remember that not all web users have the capacity to receive web
materials in the same way or at the same speed. If you ignore this,
you will minimize, not maximize, your potential audience.
The following are some potential technological variations to
consider.
Screen size – a designer may work off a 21-inch monitor, but
most users will have 17-inch screen unless of course they are
reading off their mobile phone.
Type and age of the browser – browsers are the software
systems in your PC that interpret HTML codes and turn them
into the web pages you see everyday. There are two main
makes of browser – Netscape and Internet Explorer – and they
interpret HTML differently. There are also different versions of
each make, with different facilities and functions. You should
always user test your pages to make sure they are compatible
with different browsers.
Delivery infrastructure – some users have slower modems than
others. Some are connected to sluggish servers. Some even
suffer from telephone systems that are not state-of-the-art. This
problem was highlighted in Australia where sheep farmers live
in remote rural areas. They wanted to use the web for wool
market reports and other information. However, in some cases,
single pages were taking up to three minutes to download,
costing too much time and money. The farmers needed text,