Does size matter?
September 20, 2006 by upyourego
I’m toying with a new design for the site - this time doing one from scratch instead of using a template. There are a couple of reasons for this bu the main one is that I want to update my skills.
I started my working life designing websites, well intranet sites for BT back in 1997 and have worked on everything from government portals to small acountancy sites since.
But I haven’t built a full on site from scratch since joining the BBC in 2002. It’s been four years since I’ve had a chance to scream at the screen because a piece of code wasn’t working or stay up all night because something was mis-aligned by a pixel.
I want to get back into it and try my skills at building a Wordpress template from scratch.
I’m thinking at the moment that it’s going to be easier than trying to build a site from scratch - before blogging became popular I used to build basic content management systems into my personal websites so I could update from anywhere - Wordpress handles that for me now.
The question I’ve got though is ‘does size matter’. The last site I built HAD to be built to a max screen width of 800px (or in reality 760px) - is that still the case or has 1024px taken over?
I know more and more people have bigger screens and very few within the target audience for a geek blog will use 800×600 screens (if any) but that doesn’t mean they don’t view there webpages at 800×600.
More often than not I find myself doing a few things at once on my computer screen (watching a tv show, browsing the web, writing in my blog…) so rarely have anything ‘full screen’ including my web browser - how many other people do that? Does that mean that it’s still just as important to design for 800×600 or does it not matter at all?
The re-design WILL have a fixed width, mainly because I don’t like pissing about with percentages, but also because I don’t like controls and menus far away from content if viewing at larger than ‘optimum’ width.
So should I worry about designing for 800×600 or not?
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1024 x 768 seems to be the norm these days. Check out http://www.newstoday.com - it’s a designers and new media forum. Good place to get crist on your work and for advice on technical web building skills. Let’s see some sample sites!
*crist = crits
I haven’t built anything in a long time and the last big public thing I built was the Employment & Social Security website (inc the job search kiosk) but that’s been replaced by a generic states look & feel now.
The most recent, non published piece was a concept for the Jersey Arts Centre.
http://www.leftofmiddle.co.uk/artscentre/
Oh and a site I started but couldn’t be arsed to carry on - Broadband Thing.
http://www.leftofmiddle.co.uk/broadbandthing/
I’ve also recently started work on iStockRadio but haven’t got any further than a promo page.
http://www.istockradio.com/
The last big design project for the BBC was the Media Player (that has been killed off due to new rules about content in pop-ups).
You can launch it from here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/jersey/mediaplayer_v4/l.htm
I nearly forgot the better looking (in my opinion) Liberation 60 special media player I built & designed for BBC Jersey.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/jersey/liberation_player/l.htm
Broadbandthing is definitely the most interesting site of that selection. The rest are quite straight.
Yeah broadband thing was my attempt to move away from the ’straight and narrow’ approach of designing for finance/government and try something a bit different.