Research - Internet Speed, Browsers, Fonts

When building websites, designers must take into account who is going to use their site. Although a site will have a main target audience, you will not know what they are browsing their site on, aside from making assumptions and maybe taking a survey of a group of people, but even then it will not be a guaranteed overview of the userbase. This means that the designers must work to make everything functional for even older browsers or slower connection speeds.

Internet Speed
Although almost everyone has moved from dial-up to broadband over the past decade, there are still people with slower connections that should be taken into account. Many people are starting to use their phones to browse sites, which means that their connection will be slower than a computer. Slow internet speeds must be taken into account when using lots of images on a site. Having a large background image is not usually a good idea, unless it is a compressed JPEG file. Repeating images are a better idea for sites as it uses up less bandwidth.

Browsers
Some people rarely update browsers, or do not switch from their default browser.

As seen by this usage share graph for the site W3, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser, as it is the default on Windows computers. As people are still using older versions of Internet Explorer, it makes it hader for website designers to use newer coding without it looking bad on older browsers. Even recent version of Internet Explorer do not work with come CSS3 properly, so some sites may look different in Internet Explorer.

Fonts
Fonts are another problem because of the amount of people using different computers and even mobiles and tablets. Ways around this are to add different backup fonts for sites, so if one computer does not have the main font, it does to the next one instead. Fonts can also be uploaded onto the server to stop this from happening.