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"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."     -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

There are several considerations to take into account when determining if your site is user friendly. Adding a counter to your site which provides statistics is an excellent means of determining the capabilities and preferences of internet travelers.

Below you can view the stats from The Counter.com for a 27 day period ending January 1, 1999. Things to consider when viewing these stats are noted.

Browser

Are you designing your site using a program which uses coding specific to particular browser? If so, how is your page viewed on sites which do not use that browser? Do you provide the ALT tags and sizes of all your images for viewers which do not see your graphics?

Operating System

Does your site require plugins that visitors may not be capable of running? Are you using font faces which are not available to various operating systems? Are you providing standard alternatives?

Java

Do you use Java Scripting on your site? What happens when your visitor does not have Java capable browser? Do you provide alternatives for these visitors? Do you use a menu or counter which require Java scripting? What if visitors have the capability to run JAVA but choose to turn this option off for the sake of security?

How can search engines match your META tags to your page contents if your site contains a page or more of scripting prior to the page contents? What results are viewed for search robots that do not observe META tags?

JavaScript

Same as with Java. What happens when your javascript has an error. Are you locking up the computers of others when your scripts do not function properly? Are you getting accurate visitor counts when you rely on javascript counters? It will not count those who do not have this function or choose to turn it off.

Screen Resolution

Do visitors have to scroll across the screen to view your full page? As you can see from the stats below, most users are still only capable of viewing 800 x 600. Are you taking this into considerations when planning your page layout?

Color Depth

When using a dark background which may be hard to read in some browsers? Are you using colors other then standard 256-color chart colors? How will your color choices be viewed in various browsers? Are you providing all the necessary LINK, VLINK, ALINK codes to help various browsers view your site as intended?

Javascript 1.2+:	83,621,783  (66%)

Javascript false:	25,738,793  (20%)

Javascript < 1.2:	16,058,137  (12%)

Java enabled:	79,996,975 (63%)

Java Unknown:	43,050,388 (34%)

Java disabled:	2,373,023 ( 1%)