tj mapes

Q: When does building websites with standards just become too much?…

A: When the ‘quitters’ have learning curves.

…But isn’t this the case with everything new that you have to learn? I’m sure tackling the browser quirks alone can be one gigantic stopper and self-esteem crusher especially when time is money.

So do we just give up on building sites using standards/css, even though it will be the standard in (x amount) years to come? Are we quitters?

Working for a design firm, I personally have a very busy schedule and not much allowed time to be learning. This must be done outside of work. Which is fine with me, because I enjoy it and am excited to be apart of the beginning of standards based design. (Well, not the beginning, but to everyone else out there that will never read this, it’s practically BEFORE the beginning. HA)

But for others, who live and breathe table based design and development, outside learning isn’t usually an option, especially when particular designers have families, other obligations, and are frankly just too stuborn. (not to generalize, but we all know this type) I can see how someone wouldn’t want to change/better themselves if they aren’t forced to by their employer or someone else, especially when standards based designing ISN’T the standard. Therefore seems foriegn anyway.

I still don’t agree with this way of thinking at all, but I guess I can understand. But if you are a designer, and haven’t heard about css and standards, and haven’t even tried to work through them and learn, then you have no business calling yourself a designer. That basically makes you seem as if you live under a log (your old!).

(In my personal experience) Many programmers/developers are in similar place as vertran designers when it comes to seeing DIVs all over the screen. They are basically lost at sea in a stuborn, ricket, old boat.

How will we ever overcome the gobs and gobs of nasty code produced by table based websites (and all the other pitfalls that caused from tables), if we don’t embrace new things and stop thinking, money money money! ‘Build it in tables, it will be much faster.’ Which inturn saves tons of money.

This is only true in the present. Building sites with standards would earn company ‘x’ more money in the end especially when it saves time on changes and digging through insane amounts of code. Saves time on development/coding. Accessible sites are also a great selling point. The list goes on and on.

I sadly don’t have an answer for any of this, but I will keep admiring the useage of CSS and continue to build my sites with it. That is the least I can do.

What this comes down to is something my mother used to say all the time: “If your not going to do it right the first time, then don’t do it at all. You will just have to spend double the amount of time when you have to go back and fix what you’ve already done.”

Good words of wisdom. Thanks mom.

{ 0 comments }

Yet again, being a music lover and all….I am sucked in to another online community. But Last.fm is different than others such as: Myspace, Facebook etc etc etc…forever.

This one doesn’t take 2 minutes trying to load someone’s crappy songs through some flash applet like Myspace. Man I hate that.

Last.fm has a beautiful layout and design. I’m no fan of pink mind you, but I think their colorscheme is excellent. It’s easy on the eyes, and for the most part (even though they keep adding features) it is a pretty manageable site. At first you have to do some searching around through all the text links to find your messages, favorite tags, neighbours etc but once you know where they are, it’s not hard.

Another feature that I know Andy loves is the recommendations based on what you listen to. They have music and reading (based on peoples’ posts) recommendations.

Another feature I found just tonight was my over all played albums. It actually shows all the album art ( see picture). Its pulling in from Amazon and it is really cool.

This isn’t the most relevant post, but I just wanted to let everyone know who hasn’t heard of it yet. Go check out Last.fm and use their RSS posting tools to post the latest tracks you’ve listened to on your site. Like we have on our sidebar. Or how I have on my site.

{ 0 comments }

Not so many months ago a quick ray of light blinded the www and mainly the web standards community… new, smart and innovative uses of screen real estate. A perfect example of this can be found in Powazek’s footer. He even wrote a little article on it.

I recently changed jobs and am now working for a design firm as a graphic designer. Screen real estate is very important. Especially when building corporate websites. Once I walked through the doors on my first day, I was reminded of this once again…..and again….and again. Which makes perfect sense.

“Above the fold” is a term I now use and live by which means keeping the bulk of the content , especially the most important, above the 420px mark. Which means that ‘above the fold’ is assuming that everyone viewing a website has their screen resolution set to 800px X 600px.

This is done to keep the site as accessible as possible for the most possible viewers, even though others might have a higher resolution set. This way, by default, everyone can still view the most pertinent information, without having to scroll for days. And when you add in the navigational bars and tool bars that browsers have, there is even less real estate available.

I particularly have one large monitor. My resolution is set very high (1680x1050px). Therefore I have tons of real estate, which might make this seem bias. However, I agree with Derek. I think that if not now, sometime in the next generation of web design and development, as the way we build and perceive websites, real estate will be thought of differently. And on top of that, it will (hopefully) be thought of differently in a good way, by clients and everyday visitors alike.

If I put myself in a client’s shoes, I would want all my content (logo, slogan, about us blurb, navigation, etc etc) all as close to ‘above the fold’ as possible also. But when I take the client’s shoes off, I particularly like whitespace and my content spread out without having to have cluttered, thick borders separating a books worth of content ‘above the fold’.

So if you are a designer, building something for a client, ‘embrace your bottom’ as Derek once said. Be “riskay” and propose a non-cluttered example of real estate usage by utilizing all of your assets, like the footer.

And if you are a client, be a little more open to new ideas and get excited about being in a new wave of companies on the internet that don’t have the traditional, table-based, cramped, content-overloaded website. Your visitors will thank you.

So in light of Derek’s post, when your planning your next design, or planning to get your next design, think outside the box if you will…think… “below the fold” too.

{ 0 comments }

I’ve been over checking out the new redesign of CSS Mania all day long. Its amazing. They did a great job as far as design and content. My favorite thing about the site is how its categorized. They have broken it down to categories like weblogs, technology, companies etc.

Its a great way to view how people are getting much more creative with their css designs. I particularly like it becuse I can view corporate sites and see how they are implementing css and I’m happy to report, more and more are finally moving away from table based layouts. Now if we could just get them all to do it, we’d live in a perfect world.

Go over and check it out. Just beware, you might spend hours thumbing through the galleries. :)

Some of my recent favs from css mania:
PR Blogger
alsacreations
orangeonweb
riceraiser
j6design

{ 3 comments }