Welcome to the IFX Group™

A Different Perspective

Our goal is to expand the number of perspectives for your project. While this may sound simple, it is surprisingly uncommon.

Consider web site design for example. Today there are plenty of tools to allow an average person to create a web page. With some time a single person can make a web page that contains the desired information plus graphics and maybe some multimedia (i.e. sound, video, etc.) content. With a little more time the web page can be refined to look good on the web person's one display screen and default web browser.

This is what we call single perspective web design. It is very common.

By single perspective web design we mean it looks good on one computer with one monitor and one web browser. But what happens when that same web page is shown on a different computer with a different brand monitor and possibly a different web browser running on a different operating system? More often than not, it looks different than it does on your display.

Why?

• Fonts.

Most first time web page authors think about fonts simply as an artistic way of making the page look pretty. A fancy font may look nice on the author's screen, but what does the web page look like when viewed on a computer where that font is not available? Most operating systems will try to substitute a different font, but unless the web authoring software added specific font substitution instructions, the alternate choice is not likely to look like it was originally intended. If the substitution mistakenly selects a non-alphanumeric font, like Wingdings, the text becomes unreadable.

• Color.

There are whole industries built around nothing more than accurate color. It is hard enough to get the exact desired color of ink on paper, but getting two different monitors to show exactly the same color is nearly impossible. This involves a great number of variables including the display technology, size, speed, and even age. The best choice for color is to ensure the important things are high enough contrast to remain visible even in the worst conditions.

• Media.

All that flashy video and motion on your web site might look impressive to you, but what does your web page look like when that animation can't be shown? There is no universal standard for video that is guaranteed to work the same on every web browser on every operating system. In fact every video format, web or not, always requires special player software to be installed in the browser or the operating system. What does the web page look like if that player software is not available? Any web site with content that is only available in multimedia format is effectively invisible to users with disabilities and more importantly for commercial web sites the content is invisible to search engines too. And this doesn't even touch on the bandwidth required to download the media to the user.

By now you may be noticing a common theme. It is relatively easy to create something that looks good from the perspective of one single machine, but it is a whole different thing to make that same web page look good on a lot of different machines.

So what exactly are these different perspectives and why should I care?

Target Audience

In a business setting, this is your primary customer. Unless you can absolutely ensure all of your target audience is using exactly the same setup as your web author, you can be guaranteed they will be using a variety of different (including older) operating systems, different (including older) web browsers and may or may not have any media ability. Large corporations sometimes have internal web content for the company employees that are likely to be using a company owned computer with a common operating system and default web browser. Creating web content for internal distribution is very different than web content for customers outside the company. If your web page looks bad in front of your target audience, it does nothing to attract and might even turn some away.

Alternate Audience

Unless your primary customers have disabilities, visually and aurally impaired users are rarely considered when first designing web content. This is like turning customers away at the front door of your business simply because they do not have the same abilities as your web page author. In most companies, an employee that turns away paying customers is soon fired.

Infrastructure

Think about how you find a web page when you do not know the address. You can try to guess the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address of the company, you can use a web index or you can use a web search engine.

Here are each of the choices and their associated issues.

• Guess.

Trying to guess the URL address is most often disappointing because surprisingly few companies own all of the misspellings, plural and singular versions of their name in all of the top level (.COM, .NET, .ORG, etc.) domains.

• Web index.

In the most simple form this is a list of links or bookmarks. Some of the larger web indexing sites put a little more effort into grouping the web links by class, popularity or subject, but this still requires the end user to know the kind of web site before they can find the URL address. What happens when someone from the web index first finds your web page? Do they know the category to use for your web site? What happens if you want to be listed in more than one category?

• Web search.

This is the most popular way to find a URL address because it allows you to search with keywords to find things that may not fit into web index categories. Since most people start with a web search, modern web browsers often include a place to directly search without needing to go to the search engine web page first.

Each one of these (target audience, alternate audience, infrastructure) see your web page in a different way with their own unique perspective. The target audience may be the only one that sees the pretty stuff. The alternate audience and infrastructure are likely to only see the text content. If your main content is in flashy animation, video and audio, your content is effectively invisible to everyone that can not see it, including all web indexing and search infrastructure.

How do people find you if you are invisible?

We can help.

It all starts with some perspective and that starts with a little education.