To illustrate certain trends and how I interpret and apply this information as a designer, I’ve provided some of my visitor statistics below.

Note: I highly encourage all companions to consider using one or both of these tools. Awstats is included within cPanel if you host with me and Google Analytics is a freely available if you set up an account (it requires adding a block of code to the bottom of your pages).  Doing so will not only show you overall site traffic, but you can view which pages are most popular and how long visitors are spending on each page.  These tools also provide visitor IP information, which can be a very powerful resource for security. I will write more on that in a future post.

Although most of this information came from my Google Analytics account, the Awstats tool in cPanel provides the same kind of data (with exception to screen resolution or connection speed info).

Visitor Operating Systems:

• Using Windows: 94%
• Using Macintosh: 5%
• Using Linux: 1%

How I use this information:
This is mainly just a point of reference. The visitor’s operating system isn’t nearly as important as what type of browser they are using.

Visitor Browsers:

• Internet Explorer: 47%
• Firefox: 45%
• Safari: 5%
• Opera: 1%
• Netscape: 1%
• Mozilla: 1%

How I use this information:
Although Internet Explorer currently dominates the browser market, it is actually somewhat of a ‘problem child’ for designers and developers due to lack of web standards support. A simple definition of ‘webs standards’ in this context is a set of coding guidelines or universal rules outlined by the w3c so websites display/work properly in all browsers.

IE is notorious for interpreting some things differently in your website source code. This often requires a developer to apply certain workarounds or hacks to make things display or work as they should. A perfect example is IE version 6, which doesn’t support png-24 transparencies (a .png graphic is sort of similar to a .gif), which just happens to be a very useful type of image format. The ‘Veda Designs’ title graphic at the top of all my pages should be semi-transparent in most browsers – though isn’t in IE6. Microsoft fixed this in version 7 (among other things) – so now it just a matter of waiting for people to upgrade their browsers (have you upgraded yet?).

Firefox is currently the fastest growing browser and I was pleasantly surprised to see how closely matched it was to IE in my site statistics. This is generally the browser of choice for designers and developers because of it’s loyalty to web standards.

As you can see, I don’t have many Safari (mac), Opera or Netscape visitors. My general policy on cross-browser compatibility is that I make sure things work 100% in the top two browsers. For everyone else (5% or below), the website should be accessible and working, but may have quirky display/layout issues. My VedaCMS tool doesn’t work correctly in Safari – but this is due to limitations with the browser itself.

Specific Browser Versions (only including info from the top two browsers):

Internet Explorer:

• Version 6.0 – 56%
• Version 7.0 – 41% (get it)

Firefox:

• Version 2 and up – 80% (get it)
• Version 1.5 and below – 20%

How I use this information:
Again, this is mostly just for reference. Most everything works correctly in all Firefox versions, so my primary concern is how many people are still using older versions of IE. The new IE7, although not perfect, complies much more with web standards and requires less hacks/workarounds. Version 6, on the other hand, still requires additional tweaking to make everything look right.

Visitor Screen Resolutions:

• 1024 x 768: roughly 50%
• 1280 x 1024: roughly 20%
• 1280 x 800: roughly 10%
• 1280 x 960: roughly 10%
• 800 x 600: roughly 5%
• 1600 and up: roughly 5%

How I use this information:
Screen resolution is extremely important in terms of website usability. A website looks completely different on a 800×600 screen than it does on a 1280×800 setting. As you can see, 1024 x 768 is the most popular setting (this is usually the default on new computers). The biggest problem for designers are those few folks who insist on keeping their resolution at 800×600 (to their credit, this is usually due to their ‘just not knowing any better’).

It is challenging to design a website that will look great on all resolutions. If you make a fixed-layout too narrow (which will accommodate the 800×600 folks) – there will be too much empty space for those people on higher resolutions. On the other hand, if you try to keep things comfortably wide for higher resolutions, there is a chance you will force horizontal scrollbars on anyone browsing on a 800×600 or even a 1024×768 if they have their window resized too small.

My preferred style of design for companion websites is to use more compact, fixed-width layouts. I feel these are more modern and attractive in terms of design – but generally don’t work well for incredibly verbose text. Although there are exceptions, most companions keep their site text short and sweet (a handful of paragraphs or less) – which works perfectly for compact designs.

Screen Resolution Tools:

• Check to see what screen resolution you are using
• Instructions on changing screen resolution: Windows XP | Windows Vista | OSX |

Visitor Connection Speeds:

• Cable/DSL: 87%
• Corporate/T1: 9%
• Dial-Up: 4%

How I use this information:
Connection speed determines how fast website pages will load for a given visitor. These statistics tell me that most of my visitors are on a high-speed connection and should not have to wait very long for my pages to load. Companion websites often use a lot of photos in the design & gallery, so it is important to consider how convenient (or not) your website is to browse. Regardless of connection speed, I always make an effort to keep page sizes well within the average by optimizing photos and graphics for the web and coding to web standards.

Online Image Editor Round-up

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http://www.wiredness.com/

Description:

Wiredness is an image manipulation application. Upload a photo or grab from any URL, to resize, change exposure, fix red-eye, rotate, colorize, change brightness and contrast, and much more.

Veda Rating: Excellent

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http://www.picnik.com/

Description (from their site):

With Picnik you can quickly edit all your online photos from one place. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

• One-click photo fixing or in-depth tweaking
• Crop, rotate, and resize in real-time
• Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
• Amazingly fast
• Works directly with many photo sharing sites
• No download required, nothing to install!
• Works on Mac, Windows, even Linux
• Free and premium versions

Veda Rating: Excellent

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http://www.snipshot.com

Description (from their site) :

• Our free API lets you use Snipshot for your own website
• No download necessary—100% browser based, no plug-ins required
• One-click import from any web site (including Flickr) with our bookmarklet
• Save to a free permanent URL at WebShots or to your Flickr account
• Save as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG or TIF
• One-click enhance improves most images
• Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize
• Basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or ⌘Z and ⌘Y on your Mac)
• Nondestructive editing—we always work from the original
• Edit big pictures—up to 10 MB, or 25 megapixels (5000×5000 pixels)
• Import PDF (first page only), EPS or SVG

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http://www.pikipimp.com/

Description (from their site):

pikipimp is a web based service that allows you you to edit your image online. No registration required. Crop and add special effects.

Veda Rating: Good

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http://www.pixer.us

Description (from their website):

With pixer.us you can edit your photos online using only your browser. Upload your photo using the “load image” form. In a few seconds, the image will be displayed on screen and you can start to play with it. After you’re done fixing your photo click on the “Save” button to download it using your preferred file format. All modifications are done in a non-destructive way. Your image will always keep it’s original quality!

Veda Rating: Good

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pic resize 2.0: http://www.picresize.com/

Description (from their site):

Resize, shrink, and crop your pictures online for free at PicResize.com. Resize photos before posting them on your MySpace, Xanga, Facebook, and blog!

Veda Rating: Good

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pixenate: http://pixenate.com

Description (from their website):

A quick and easy way to design and edit your image online.

Veda Rating: Good

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• All data sent through your contact form is encrypted between your visitors computer and your web server so that it cannot be eavesdropped upon, intercepted, or modified during transmission. This is like a “secure pipe” between your visitor and web server that no one can penetrate.

There are essentially two ways I recommend setting up a secure web form. The one you should use depends on the type of email address you want:

1. Purchase an SSL certificate and dedicated IP address for your website ($60/year): This works best if you set up a domain email address (you@yourdomain.com) and check your mail directly on the server via the webmail integrated with your hosting account.
2. Purchase Hushmail’s Secure Form Premium Service ($90/year with their webmaster bundle): This is ideal for people who want to use a Hushmail address. Hushmail also allows you to check external POP3 email accounts – which means you could still receive email from your domain address through your Hushmail account.

Important details to consider when using your own SSL Certificate…..
What most people don’t realize is that information sent from a secure web form is only secure between your visitors computer and the web server that the security certificate is installed on. This means that if you have an SSL certificate installed on your website, the connection is only secure between your visitors PC and the web server.

If you download your emails off of the server with a desktop email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) or have your web form send the contact data to an email address not on the web server (yahoo, hotmail, aol)….the transmission will no longer be secure once it leaves the server.
For this reason, I recommend people only purchase their own SSL certificate and dedicated IP if they plan on using a domain email address & checking it directly on the server. Any other delivery method will compromise the security you had set up.

In general, I think Hushmail is better suited for what most adult entertainers need in terms of web form security. The only draw back is that you have to sign up for a premium account in order to access the secure forms tool, which requires that you give them your real name & billing information. This may be an issue for ladies who are trying to keep their professional and personal identities completely separate.

Many ladies use Husmail to communicate with clients because they believe their correspondences are secure and encrypted. In actuality, these email exchanges are only secure & encrypted if sending and receiving mail from another Hushmail address. Emails to and from non-hushmail accounts are just as insecure as if you were writing from any other type of email address.

Of course, because many people don’t even realize this – you could keep using Hushmail for appearance sake. Just keep in mind that nothing is actually encrypted to or from non-hushmail addresses (in case that was your primary goal in using Hushmail).

Note: They do, however, provide a service called Hushmail Express….which allows you to send an encrypted message to anyone within or outside the Hushmail network. It is basically an email message you send out from an encrypted web form on their website.

Although it may be tempting to have your site look the best on a 20″ Widescreen LCD monitor at a 1280×720 screen resolution, it is crucial to remember that only a small percentage of your visitors will be seeing what you’re seeing.

Statistics show that roughly 57% of Internet users are browsing at a 1024×768 screen resolution. What can be frustrating about this is that there are still almost 20% of users still browsing at 800×600, so it can be difficult accommodating both user groups while maintaining the most attractive layout for your site.

If a fixed-width layout (which, IMHO usually make the most attractive/modern looking designs) is set too wide, an 800×600 user will get horizontal scrollbars. However, trying to accommodate those 800×600 folks can leave a lot of empty whitespace on higher resolutions.

Then there are differences in browsers. Internet Explorer commands a bit over 50% of the market, with Firefox coming in 2nd with almost 28% right now. Although the new IE7 is much more web standards compliant – the fact still remains that different browsers will render your site differently. The better the site is coded, the less drastic those differences will be. Even so, if you compare your site in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and any other browser, you’re almost sure to notice slight-to-major differences in spacing, layout, fonts or more.

And finally, there is speed.

With the availability of broadband these days, it can seem amazing that over 20% of users are still on a dial-up connection (heheh…maybe they’re also the ones with their monitors set to 800×600). Because appearances are very important with the adult entertainment websites, it usually isn’t an option for you to skimp on photos or graphics. You need your site to look great…so unless your specifically going for a utilitarian look….it is perfect acceptable to be liberal with your design & photos.

Even so, you need to be conscientious of not doing things like loading a 3 MB music file in the background while people are trying to use your site (background music is always a bad idea in general anyways). And you should *always* optimize or compress your photos for the web before uploading them to your site. Fresh off a digital camera…a single photo can be anywhere from 1-10 MB (megabytes) in size. You can easily get the size down to a fraction of that by optimizing with a photo editing program.

Ultimately, there are limitations to how much you can do about making your site look universally similar on every computer. But understanding and taking into consideration that these differences exist will help you be more realistic about what you should or shouldn’t do with a website. A good rule of thumb is to make your site look the very best for the majority of users but understand that you also need to make sure it is still attractive and usable for those in the minority.

After taking the last five days off from work, I was welcomed this morning with about 2,500 spam emails in Outlook. Keep in mind I check about 8 other domain email accounts aside from the Veda Designs mail – so this is a pretty normal build-up for five days of being offline.

Spam, my darlings, is an unfortunate but mostly unavoidable consequence of posting your email address on the web. There are methods to help prevent it (such as encrypting your email address on your website or using a graphic in lieu of an email link), but even if you guard your email by savvy publishing on your website, spam bots can harvest it from any other website you’ve posted your email to.

The good news is that there are some pretty nifty tools out there which will at least allow you to filter the good from bad mail if you use an email client like Outlook to download your mail. I personally use SpamBayes, which…IMHO…is one of the very best open source (free) spam filter tools for Outlook. It does require a bit of initial training which allows you to teach it good mail from bad, but once you’ve done this – I’d say it catches about 95% or more of the bad mail.

Unfortunately, it occasionally flags good mail as bad (false-positives). Usually this is from addresses that have numbers or dashes in the email address and come from free webmail accounts. It doesn’t happen often enough to offset the benefits of the program and even when it does happen…you can easily let the program know that this is a safe address (thus avoiding future spam filtering).

There are also commercial (you pay for it) spam filtering tools. Here is a very comprehensive list from PCMag.com with ratings.

In summary, if you are being plagued by spam and you use a windows email client (sorry, don’t know what is available for mac users) – there are definitely options available that would make checking email less of a headache.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to explore the Yahoo Mail Plus service after working with a client that subscribes to it. For $19.99/year, the Plus Mail will allow you to receive and send from multiple POP3 accounts (like your domain email address). The new Beta UI looks somewhat like Outlook 2003, with the folder tree vertical on the left and the email list w/message preview on the right. Overall I was rather impressed with the value and features.

Hushmail also has premium services and can be better suited for providers given their standards of security. They have business accounts starting at $2/month which allows you to send/receive email from your own domain address. There are additional tools available such as an encryption plugin for Outlook (IMAP access) and secure forms (to encrypt data sent through your web form). The price goes up for additional services, but for less than a $100 a year for everything, it is really an incredible deal given the alleviated risks.

And if you absolutely refuse to pay for email….Google offers the free GMAIL service which also allows you receive POP3 email and set up multiple ‘From’ addresses so you can send email which appears to come from your own domain. It doesn’t have the pretty UI like Yahoo or the security of Hushmail, but it is fast, easy to use and they give you 2GB of storage. I’m not sure if they still require invitations to sign up…but I have a ton of them if anyone wants one.

Hotmail also has a premium service, though truthfully – I was never all that impressed with it. The UI is ok I guess – but the new Live version seems clunky and buggy to me.

Then of course there are the free webmail clients included with your cpanel hosting account (Horde, SquirrelMail, NeoMail) – though unfortunately they are quite ugly and clunky to navigate through.