In the web world - it’s increasingly hard to be exceptional. And to constrain a design to 800px wide makes that job just that extra degree harder IMO. But nice to see things move ahead - and as I said, nice to see more UI interaction and the YUI libraries put to use. Keep it up!

My name is, through some form of good fortune, also Simon and I am the interface designer at Quickflix. Thanks for noticing and commenting on the new rework of the design of our site. We are constantly working on new and enhanced layouts. I wish to respond to your comment about the width of our site just quickly if I may.

User demographics are very important in designing a site, as I am sure you know. At Quickflix our site user statistics have shown while the larger screen sizes are becoming more of the norm, as you say, we still see a surprisingly large percentage of our users on the classic 800×600 screen size. We could have blown these users off and gone with a larger screen width, made concessions in our design to accommodate a liquid layout, or had to wrestle with which bits of content will be hidden on these people screens. We chose to stick with our familiar page width for now, but I can assure you we have new and exciting enhancements in the works.

Why so many users on smaller screen sizes you may ask? I have pondered this myself, as my job means I must take into account many aspects of our user base, including browser spread, browser capabilities, accessibility and demographics. I came to a very loose assumption based on the statistics I have access to, and while I have no way of confirming this other than ringing our members around Australia this is the best I get:

From my experience of working on projects to aid people in remote areas of Australia get internet access I have found users in these regional areas tend to be on slow connections, with older PCs. You’d be surprised how many users are still restricted to 14,400 or 28,800 kbps modems. They usually have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest machines and are quite happy to make do with older pc’s that the tech savvy amongst us would have given up on years ago.

Quickflix, being the business that it is, attracts a wide range of users, including a rather large number of regional users who like the convenience of our service and the range of titles they have at their fingertips which they would not normally have access to.

Quickflix (and inherently myself) would have been disappointing a lot of loyal members of our service to lower the quality of our website for a collection of users that not only enjoy our service but have also proven loyal and helpful.

I love the Applebox idea. I think it is a fantastic evolution of the video store and I look forward to seeing more of your blog posts in the future.

Keep up the good work.