| About Us - September 2013 |
We've made some changes to our website to make it more phone-friendly.
When we started this website, most users accessed the Internet with 1200 baud dial-up connections. Some had 2400 baud acoustic modems, and the cutting edge was 9600 baud. Some of our readers don't remember that because our 17-year-old website is older than they are.
Download times were slow in those days, and web browsers were primitive. There were no active server pages or Java scripts. The early web page design tools didn't work very well, so I used a simple text editor to convert every article to HTML using only the most basic features so that the pages would load quickly and work for every browser.
Times have changed; but our website hasn't (very much). I still convert all the articles by hand. Our formatting style has remained constant for uniformity, and is geared toward making it easy to print the articles.
But now, more and more people are using their phones (or other personal computing devices) to access the Internet. David wrote to tell us his experience with our website.
|
I was just reading your page about why your website is 'no frills'. For this reason it was one of the only websites I could read on my old mobile phone without it being translated by Google (did you know Google automatically does that for complicated web pages being read on simple phones, even splitting them into pages?) While I have a smartphone now, I know that many in the third world access the internet by old mobile phones, and only by mobile phones, so thought I'd point out the one problem I did used to have when reading your site that way. Basically, a lot of the pages are so big they wouldn't fit in the phone. I don't know if it's the amount of data or the length of the page (you'd assume it's the amount of data, but some other pages had a few pictures and were fine, and I'd think a few pictures would take up more memory than a few pages of text). Even the topical index could never load completely. I'm not sure what to suggest doing about this without making the site more awkward to use for the majority of users who just want everything on one page, but I thought I'd make sure you're aware of the issue anyway. |
Each month we add several articles to the website. As a result, the topical index, past newsletter index, and website of the month index were getting longer every month. Apparently old mobile phones had trouble with lists of more than 650 articles.
To solve this problem, we have broken the index pages up into one page for every year, with a master calendar page which directs traffic to the year of interest. We use simple tables which vaguely resemble the Windows 8 directory style. We hope this makes our website easier to use regardless of how you access it.
| Quick links to | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Science Against Evolution Home Page |
Back issues of Disclosure (our newsletter) |
Web Site of the Month |
Topical Index |