Nalgene-Outdoor.com
Updated
Thermo Fischer Scientific is the company behind the iconic Nalgene branded water bottles. Although Nalgene introduced some of the first durable plastic water bottles for the outdoor sporting goods industry, they have remained top of their game through maintaining an excellent product and a strong brand.
Their website is no exception. On the font page is a large image of their iconic water bottle as well as a healthy dose of information regarding the controversial BPA. In addition Nalgene is involved on Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.
Critiques:
- Their menu system doesn’t adequately mesh with the rest of their site. In my browser at least, the cursor doesn’t change to indicate links
- The internal pages are somewhat inconsistent
- They used graphics when they could have used text. Although they were able to absolutely pick their fonts and styling to match their brand, it detracts from the accessibility of the site.
Jade left this comment at 12:50 am
This doesn’t work in 800*600, which violates such a fundamental rule of web design.
It would be nice if there were a way to auto-detect resolution settings and use a different stylesheet for smaller resolutions. Maybe there is a way and I don’t know about it?
Taylor Dewey left this comment at 4:03 pm
@Jade: I don’t agree that designing for a particular monitor resolution is a fundamental rule. I understand where the reasoning behind 640×480 designs comes from though. Each project is different in regards to how it should look and function given the context of the end user. I don’t know the exact user demographics of nalgene-outdoor.com but if it’s anything like w3schools, it makes very little sense to design for 800×600.
According to w3schools.com (whose statistics are likely somewhat skewed toward technology savvy) only 4% of all web users were using displays at 800×600. 36% were using 1024×768 and 57% had their monitors set higher than that. In web design it is impossible to design for the lowest common denominator, instead we must design for the largest audience for the least amount of extra work.
Current industry standard is to design for 1024×768 at 24bit color unless usage statistics for a particular audience dictate otherwise.
While I’m on my soapbox, all IE6 users should hurry up and upgrade to IE7. Once IE8 is released to the masses I’m going to seriously consider ceasing all testing and support for IE6 — a hideous, awful browser (currently about 17% of all users, a stat likely skewed toward IE7 and Firefox).