When you look at your data, you might just find that CRT is far from dead and 800×600 still defines a majority of your audience.

Designers: Time to Go Back to School

In the US, CRTs still rule the schools. There are several solid reasons why this might remain the case for some time to come:

• Durability – It’s pretty hard to scratch the glass on CRT.
• Security – after all who steals a CRT?
• Financial – While LCD prices have come down, many older computers need video card upgrades to tap into them. In addition, there’s another good argument: “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

On the educational sites I’ve worked with, it is not uncommon to see 80% of the visitors coming in at 800×600. This might bum out the designers, but they have to be sensitive to that data. If the visitors are captive to the lower resolution, they’re not going to take kindly to a fancy design that causes endless scrolling.

Marketers: This is Your Father’s Internet

Going back to my last article, I mentioned early adopters and how they are likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Looking at demographic studies, the top end of that group generally falls into the under-50 crowd with some reports inching up toward age 55.

Even though marketers have good reason to salivate over the potential of the most well-off group of retirees in the history of the country, the fact of the matter is that new computers are pretty far down the list for the majority of that group. They might have a 50″ television set in the living room, but there’s a dusty old CRT in the den.

And it’s probably going to stay that way for quite awhile.

So what do you do with this data?

You dig deeper and you test.

Based on my experience, I’d focus on developing a design that places less emphasis on fast scanning and links between areas of the site. You are likely to find that this segment will spend more time reading your copy and less time looking for the “scent of information”. This means they’ll also get quite frustrated when you make then dig to get what they want.

Of course, I might be completely wrong about your audience. That’s why I recommend you dig into the data and test.

I realize it’s hard not to go glassy-eyed when designers and web developers start spouting phrases like “aspect ratio” and “backwards compatibility,” but listen up, marketing folks! Browser and screen resolutions matter because there’s money to be made.

“What’s that Browser Capabilities menu?”

Every web analytics package has that seldom viewed report called “browser capabilities” (or something similar). In that section, you will find such thrilling choices as:

• Browsers
• Operating Systems
• Screen Resolutions
• … More things you don’t want to know.

But drop on in there and ask yourself these questions:

1. Who converts better? Mac or PC users? Vista, XP, or OSX?
2. What is the average order size of visitors who use 800×600 vs. 1280×1024?
3. Do Firefox users buy more than IE6 users? What about IE7?

That’s Nice. Why Do I Care?

When I looked at recent stats for one site, I was surprised to find out that Mac users were the most valuable customers. In fact, the lift on PC users was over 80%. When I dug a little deeper, I found that XP users, while a very large percentage of the visitor pool, lagged well behind Vista.

What kind of conclusions might we draw from this information?

Affluence is one obvious answer. Vista might mean the visitor has a new computer. It may also mean they’re just early adopters, which again may signal affluence. Apple users tend to have higher incomes as well (at least according to some surveys).

As you may expect, I also found that the higher the screen resolution, the better the buyer. Even more interesting was the insight that widescreen aspect ratios (16:9) had the best rates of all. At the moment, most widescreen monitors are attached to shiny new laptops as opposed to desktops (though this is changing).

Can we infer that laptop users buy more? And if so, why?

The browser question drove similar results… IE7 beat out IE6 by a wide margin (even though visitors were even). Firefox beat them both.

So what do you do with this data?

You dig deeper and you test. These aren’t small scale tests either.

In the case of Vista vs. XP, we’re talking about more than 60% of all visitors to the site. You may find that IE6 has a lower conversion because something is actually broken on the site. If you try out different resolutions, you might find that your site is easier to navigate at higher resolutions.

Geek out aside, I’m talking about large audiences with a clear differences in response. These are segments worth investigating. You may be leaving enormous amounts of money on the table, or perhaps it is just walking out the door.

Rally with your designers and developers, test and QA. Champion their ideas, and you just might find that next campaign hidden amid the most boring data in your analytics package.

Oh, and lest you think I’m biased on the side of big, shiny Macs, stayed turned for the next installment on browsers and screen resolutions – Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better, Long Live the CRT.

From Wikipedia:

E-mail spoofing is a term used to describe fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and other parts of the email header are altered to appear as though the email originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header), ill-intentioned users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. It is often associated with website spoofing which mimics an actual, well-known website but are run by another party either with fraudulent intentions or as a means of criticism of the organization’s activities. The result is that, although the e-mail appears to come from the email indicated in the “From” field (found in the email headers) it actually comes from another e-mail address, probably the same one indicated in the “Reply To” field; if the initial e-mail is replied to, the delivery will be sent to the “Reply To” e-mail, that is, to the spammer’s email.

Quite a mouthful there… To simplify, email spoofing is the fancy name for bogus email messages that look like they came from you.

Interested in fixing the problem?

Why Bloggers (and everyone else) should care about Email Spoofing

The obvious reason to care about spoofing is that someone is using your good name to shuttle spam messages into unsuspecting inboxes. Not only can this have a negative impact your reputation, but it can also lead to having legitimate emails from your domain banned by ISPs large and small.

Imagine what might happen if your 30K subscriber newsletter suddenly died.

If that isn’t bad enough, spoofing is often used as a way of phishing for login information. The spoofer sends an email pretending to be you (or your server admin) and asks for passwords or sends links that lead to other nefarious places on the net.

This is not where you want to be.

How to Deal with Spoofing

1. Lock down your mail server so it won’t relay spam

Attached to the Wikipedia entry is a link to an article on CERT about email spoofing. This article provides a few good tips about securing your mail server.

To summarize, the main idea is to lock your outbound mail server (SMTP) so that it does not relay messages willy-nilly. This will stop spammers from sending email directly from your domain.

Most mail servers in hosted environments already lock down open relay, so this is generally not a problem. However, you might want to check just to be sure. I tested a few tools out there and found the open relay tester at SpamHelp.org to be the fastest and easiest for non-technical users.

2. Add a SPF record to your domain

Even if your mail server is locked down, it is still possible for a spammer to execute an email spoof. They just send the message through another mail server. As the CERT article points out, SMTP lacks authentication but there is a way around this limitation: Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

In simple terms, SPF is a record of valid IP addresses that can send email on behalf of a particular domain. You can think about it as a power of attorney for email.

If configured to check for SPF, a receiving mail server will look up the SPF record for your domain and check that against the origin address for the spam message. Assuming the spammer is sending from a server other than your own, the IP address will not match the list of valid address for your domain and the spam message will get zapped.

Here are two links to help you get started with SPF:

• See if you have an SPF record: Scott Kitterman’s SPF Record Testing Tools.
• Get help creating the SPF record: OpenSPF’s SPF Record Setup Wizard.

[Note: When you start looking into SPF, you will probably see references to Sender ID as well. Sender ID is yet another authentication method for SMTP. It goes a step further than SPF, but it is also a proprietary format from Microsoft. Generally, I have no problems with Sender ID, but the adoption rate is slow.]

3. Contact your Hosting Company or ISP

While I am a technical fellow by trade, I do not claim to be an security expert. The recommendations above are a reflection of my attempt to distill a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo about email spoofing into something that regular folks can use.

If you need more detailed advice, I recommend that you start by contacting your hosting company or ISP. They should have dedicated staff for addressing email and security issues.

A Few More Things to Think About

Whenever you make changes to the configuration of your site or DNS records, Bad Things May Happen. The consequences of mail server configurations can be somewhat surprising too.

1. Implementation of SPF may end up blocking delivery of certain automated emails from your website. Why? If your mail server is on IP address X and your site is on IP address Y, scripts that send mail from Y might get blocked unless you add SPF records for both addresses. Make sure to map all the places where systems originate email.

2. Locking down SMTP relay, while a good an important thing can also end up breaking processes that rely on the relay. If you have a program that sends out email and uses your mail server as a relay, it is possible that shutting down the relay will cause that process to fail. This generally happens when the process in question is on another server but that is not a given. Make sure to test along the way and be prepared to roll back in event of problems.

Best of luck!

Every Page Is Your Homepage:

The premise is simple: every page of your Website must now be considered a homepage. The hours spent tinkering on your current homepage needs to shift into ensuring that every page is a brilliant representation for the keywords and external links that drove someone to your site. Fewer and fewer consumers are coming in via the homepage. They could also care less about what your company does or the other products you sell. They were searching for something specific, and if it’s not there after they’ve clicked on a search result link, they’re you’re roadkill on the information super highway.

[Via: Six Pixels (Mitch Joel)]

The Ultimate Unit Test Failure:

But when it comes time to marshal the solution to the problems, we find ourselves slamming into this kind of Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man of software development.

[Via: Coding Horror]

Are you the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man of your dev team? Make sure to check out the recommended title too: Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

You can find out more about Steve Krug on his website – sensible.com [natch].

Here’s a quote from the book:

It’s always interesting to watch Web designers and developers observe their first usability test. The first time they see a user click on something completely inappropriate, they’re surprised. (For instance, when the user ignores a nice big fat “Software” button in the navigation bar, saying something like, “Well, I’m looking for software, so I guess I’d click here on ‘Cheap Stuff’ because cheap is always good.”) The user may even find what he’s looking for eventually, but by then the people watching don’t know whether to be happy or not.

The second time it happens, they’re yelling “Just click on ‘Software’!” The third time, you can see them thinking: “Why are we even bothering?”

Frameworks Round-Up: When To Use, How To Choose?:

Software frameworks provide developers with powerful tools to develop more flexible and less error-prone applications in a more effective way. Software frameworks often help expedite the development process by providing necessary functionality “out of the box”. Such things include user/role management, data access, caching, and much more. These frameworks aid in helping you focus on the more important details of design and even project management by alleviating the need to reinvent the wheel for common development needs.

[Thanks!: Smashing Magazine]

Reflections of an Interface Designer:

Web application design is surprisingly organic. I’ve never designed something so volatile and delicate. In college, web design always felt cold and distant. It was the least exciting medium for me. I preferred anything else to it: print, paint, sculpture, mixed media, video, performance. I was addicted to eliciting emotions and I couldn’t imagine anything farther from my audience than the Internet. But Wufoo has showed me that software can have personality and feel more alive than anything else I’ve ever created. Because thousands of users are using something I’ve created in realtime, it responds almost immediately to the slightest modifications. Moving a button, changing a color, rewriting copy. All of it matters and in different and surprising ways. This is so different from creating framed art work for a gallery where feedback and the possibility of response and interaction is difficult and mostly non-existent.

[Via: Particletree]

More Than A Screen Shot: Kwout Captures What You Want, Including Clickable Hyperlinks:

There have been many times we’ve wanted to use a screen shot of a website to illustrate an article on The Content Wrangler, but we chose not to, because the image was full of hypertext links. Images that contain hyperlinks that don’t work are confusing to site visitors. But, thanks to the folks at Kwout, avoiding website screen captures because of inactive hyperlinks is a thing of the past.

[Via: TheContentWrangler.com]

Here is an example using the article from ContentWrangler and the links are clickable. Very slick.

The Content Wrangler via kwout

An Event Apart 2008: Kickin’ it off in the Big Easy:

An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites, presents its agenda for 2008. Kicking it off is a monster, two-day session in the city of New Orleans, featuring twelve of your favorite web design authors. It’s like bringing your bookshelf to life.

[via: An Event Apart News]

JavaScript Libraries By Comparison [5]:

There are several factors to consider when compiling the necessary information for this comparison. The first, and most important, is terminology. Even though there are numerous features and functionalities for each JavaScript library that are similar, they do not always fit neatly into predetermined headings. It remains imperative that each library feature be weighted while keeping this in mind, and when appropriate, read the full description that accompanies each heading. This is a fantastic starting point for your own research and analysis.

[via: javascript ant - Articles]

Aaron Newton popped a nice link in the comments too about why he chose Mootools. Definitely worth a read if Mootools is on your radar.