Don’t you hate it when a site is revamped and when you come back it’s completely different, confusing, and practically unnavigable?
Over twenty years have passed since I first created The Mega Man Home Page (“MMHP”). When it comes to the technical design of the page, my desire has always been twofold: be easy to use but also be a site that works in as many browsers as possible, even ancient ones.
What prompted the most recent update was a desire to make the site easier to read on phones and tablets. Sure, the original site was created back in the day of “liquid” layouts (sometimes known as flexible layouts), so it has always flexed to various window sizes. However, at the time that I created it, pretty much no one was using a screen smaller than 640x480, and giant resolutions were relatively unheard of as well. So the site flexed...but only within limits. Certain pages became a little wonky if squeezed narrower than 600 pixels, and the site didn’t properly handle mobile viewports at all (since it was kind of written before iPhones existed).
So, considering that, I wanted to take the same basic design and make it more adaptable so that it would work on tiny little phone screens without sacrificing the appearance on regular monitors. I also attempted to utilize more space in the other direction, though I admit, if you have a gigantic screen, there’s still going to be a lot of empty space—sorry! But at least you won’t be facing a single unbroken line of text extending all the way across the window anymore...for what it’s worth.
If you’re in between those extremes you should notice the overall design has mostly stayed the same—and this was deliberate. I’ve received a great deal of feedback from visitors who like the nostalgia of the traditional old-school design, and I wanted the site to remain the same MMHP that you may have grown up with. I did make a few minor adjustments, such as flipping the logo to the upper left corner (usability suggests that’s the best place for the site logo). But generally speaking you should feel right at home.
Unfortunately, doing this “properly” meant abandoning support for the truly ancient browsers. Sadly, any browser that doesn’t parse the CSS is just going to see really boring black-and-white text (unlike the previous versions of the site which went all the way back to somewhere around Netscape 4 or thereabouts). And anything which doesn’t correctly parse the CSS (which is pretty much everything pre-Internet Explorer 7) is going to really butcher the site. As a compromise, I attempted to use what Internet Explorer 9 supports as a threshold this time (with some fixes for 8 and 7 to make the site at least reasonably readable on them in theory). If you’re still on Windows 95 or MacOS 7 or something...well, the content should still be readable, at least.
As always, should you end up with a page that is completely unreadable, please send a screen shot of the problem area and I’ll try to fix it. Do mention what browser and computer operating system you are using as this makes a big difference. With all of the different devices these days, I am no longer able to test on every possible browser.
