March 6, 2000

1:00 AM

Good God, does the Fuji Film website suck.I run tall windows on my monitors, typically 700-800 pixels wide, but around a thousand pixels long, and over half my screen is blank on the Fuji site. Why on earth did they force everything to 500 pixels or so of height? I've never seen a consumer site like this do that before. The other peeve is I bought their smart media floppy adapter, and I wanted to know if there were new Windows2000 drivers for it (it came with Win9x drivers on one disk, and NT drivers on the other). Their support area only lists phone numbers of service centers, no mention of software driver downloads or knowledge bases, or even a FAQ about products. This company does *not* get the web, wake up Fuji Film, it's the 21st century now.
posted by mathowie (9 comments total)

Their site looks like it was designed for a 800x600 res, the resolution now used by the majority of users. Very few people have monitors that support 1000 pixels long.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 5:59 AM on March 6, 2000

Yeah, but why shouldn't the page scroll? That was my point, why waste the bottom of the page?
posted by mathowie at 6:28 AM on March 6, 2000

The layout was obviously designed by their art department. I see this a lot in my job. The art director will never listen to "coders" who insist web pages should not be forced into fixed size windows. They only care how it looks in print. After a while you just give up and code it that way.
posted by y6y6y6 at 6:50 AM on March 6, 2000

When I'm designing for a client, I almost always have the "key" info above the fold (ie the 1st 450ish px), and actually have done several sites where the whole thing fits in that space. The reason is exactly what TO said - when your users are likely to be at the lower end of the scale technically (and a fair number of bellydancer sitegoers are), you want to design so that they get everything they need on the screen. Generally, you'd have secondary info following that on the page, unless that's not how your site is laid out.

On a related note:
A few of my older sites were set up as static tables, assuming a single screenfull == 560 x 400. I was doing updates this weekend, and the site owner asked why the pages were so narrow. I explained that we had discussed it when we initially set up the site, and that he hadn't expressed an interest in modifying it. (He's a legacy site that I charged too little for as a favor to a friend, and I got locked into a too cheap update fixed update price - so I only do the agreed upon updates and don't push to do extra work at way below market cost) Well, it's a magazine, so he's got a big screen and he wants it bigger. I explain that I can set it up dynamically, so that the size matches the size of the browser window, but that the cover page would run the risk of not looking at all like his magazine (which is what he wanted). We finally agreed to increase the cover page size to 640px wide, and to make the inside pages dynamic. Fine. So I rework the tables - no big deal - and do the monthly updates. Yesterday I get a call - WHY ARE THE PAGES SO WIDE??? He says 'I have a 21" high resolution monitor and it's almost off the page for me - so smaller screens must be impossible to read' - I remind him of our discussion, and he says that's too wide and it looks bad... Okay. So I end up re-reworking the inside pages to match the cover page at 640. Total time for my montly updates? 6 hours. Total pay? $50. *grumblegrumblegrumblegrumble*

Joe
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:33 AM on March 6, 2000

Fuji's SmartMedia Floppy Adapter FAQ. The software download page doesn't have any Win2000 drivers on it.
posted by tomalak at 10:53 AM on March 6, 2000

Thanks a lot Lawrence, you're quite the info-digger!
posted by mathowie at 11:27 AM on March 6, 2000

I'm betting that the designers were presented with some print outs of pages and were told "the Web site needs to look just like this." And they meant it. It should look exactly like that. I had a client just like that, and no matter how many times I said, "it's not a print media, it's a display media!" while beating my head against the wall and stabbing myself in the chest with a poisoned dagger, they insisted that their layouts carefully planned by the marketing department using expensive desktop publishing software was 'designed to fit a browser' whatever the hell that means.

Gyah!
posted by honkzilla at 11:39 AM on March 6, 2000

this is a
test
posted by mathowie at 1:14 AM on June 21, 2000