I must say, I really like the new web site design that C|Net rolled out today. It, however, has a significant problem: It uses a font without delta hinting. I recently blogged about why this is an issue; there are a number of users using older operating systems without clear type or other modern font rendering technologies complaining about the font being gray and nay-to-unreadable.
I admire C|Net for making a web site design using a very attractive font that breaks the mold of "web safe" fonts we have been stuck with for over a decade, but I do not think modern font rendering technologies are ubiquitous enough to make a website that demands them.
Then again, C|Net should be more interested in the users who will click on the ads and maximize their ad revenue than they are on the users too cheap to upgrade their computer operating system (and probably run adblock to boot).
I was able to make a completely portable design for my web page that looks really nice on everything from legacy version of Internet Explorer to small smartphones, as well as desktops running modern browsers.
Then I added ads to my website.
As part of my contract with Google's ad sense, I am required to have the ads visible on my website. Even if the ads ruin the look of the website on portable browsers.
The best solution would be to have the sidebar with the ads visible below the other content on mobile browsers using narrow screens. Alas, in order to make the site compatible with legacy versions of Internet Explorer (I get about 6 times the number of IE6 hits as I get combined iPhone and iPad hits; never mind IE7 and IE8 hits), I had to make the layout a HTML table, which precludes me from making this change.
The second-best solution would be to have the data on the right hand side, off of the screen but visible by horizontally scrolling. This is also difficult to do since there is no CSS property "screen width" (100% in CSS means something different).
What I have settled on doing is having a minimum width for the web page's left-side content be 210 pixels; this means that there is some reasonable room for the content even on browsers using older iPhones or even tiny 240x320 screens, while keeping at least some of the ads visible on the right hand side of the screen. It's not pretty, but it is usable.
For me to come up with a better solution, I would have to rewrite the HTML for dozens of pages (to remove the table and use a pure CSS solution) and use separate CSS for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. I will hold off on doing this until smart phones become a higher percentage of the number of visitors of my web site.
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