The best example to start with is the site you are looking at. It is my greatest achievement in web development, and it illustrates many principles one has to reckon with when designing for the world wide web. But before going any further, I would like to thank Al Sparber and Gerry Jacobson of Projectseven.com for providing the inspiration for this web site, Massimo Foti of Massimocorner.com for his generosity in sharing his Dreamweaver extensions and knowledge, and Eddie Traversa of DHTML Nirvana for showing me what is possible in web design. This site was coded in Homesite, Dreamweaver, Topstyle, Flash and HTML Kit.
This site was first posted in December of 2001. After wrestling with my previous site design for an inordinate amount of time, trying to make it display properly in Netscape Navigator 4.x, and Internet Explorer 4.x and up, I had to make some hard decisions. As this site became more and more complex, and as I became more and more excited about the way it was turning out, it soon became apparent that it was not going to work in Navigator 4.x without dumping significant features. I checked with thecounter.com and saw that Netscape 4.x had shrunk down to 5% market share. I figure that most of these users are corporate, we all know how slow corporations are to upgrade their software. That was all I needed to hear, goodbye Netscape 4.x. (And good riddance!).
My next logical issue to deal with was Netscape 7.x, and Opera 6.x. I built my pages and validated them with the W3C, and lo and behold, they worked in Netscape, and kind of worked in Opera. According to thecounter.com, their market share as of 1/03 was 0% each. I mean, come on, I'm trying to work with you...

That leaves me with an 87% market share if I support Internet Explorer 4.x and up. I must say that I wish Netscape 6.2 and Opera could compete. Somebody should be providing some competition for Microsoft. They shouldn't have the only standards-compliant browser out there, but at this point in time, it appears that they have.
On a more gut-level, bottom line note, I would like to say a few words about design concepts. There is no right or wrong here, these are just my feelings, arrived at after doing this for a few years. I believe that it is better to have a compelling, interesting site that may not be accessible to everyone out there, than a boring, bland site that can be viewed in every browser ever invented. I know that this model won't work for everyone, but it is something to keep in mind. I have designed a few sites now, and I can tell you that the "lowest common denominator" sites, the ones created to load fast and be backwards-compatible, don't generate as much traffic as the more creative, less generic ones. Mind you, I am talking about sites that I have created, and monitored their traffic on my server. I think people want to be entertained, and that entertainment can be visual, aural, or content driven.
This is a very exciting time, and the web is changing quickly. We are all lucky to be able to help shape the birth of this new mass medium.

-David Thomas Peacock