That Standards Guy is the online persona of Karl Dawson, a web developer living and working in Ipswich, England.
I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and the Web Standards Group and team member at Accessites—an awards site to recognise accessible and usable websites.
I specialise as a front-end developer and worry about the minutae of semantic (X)HTML and CSS, accessibility, microformats, typographic rhythm and grid design. I also care about the user experience and remind myself constantly of visitor site goals when working with clients and their aims.
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November 26th, 2007
Well here it is. A fixed-width 960px layout. Yes, you read correctly - a fixed-width 960px layout. 2% of the site visitors are at 800×600 screen resolution (and yes, I know that’s not the same as browser window size). Defending the design choices already, sheesh. Still, need to go through it now and also add some more pages.
Love the look Karl… even though I now have to maximize my not 2% browser resolution to a full screen to remove the scroll bar.
Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Just giving cause to your preemptive defense
November 26th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
1680×1050 screen resolution here. When I’m browsing, Firefox is maximised but when multi-tasking I reduce it to something workable with all the other windows
“It depends” is a great mantra lol.
I’m not feeling it with this design yet though - I might have been looking at it too close for too long, there’s a lot of typographic and grid detail but perhaps some more whitespace between the columns is needed.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Really good and really interesting post. I expect (and other readers maybe :)) new useful posts from you!
Good luck and successes in blogging!
November 27th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Good effort. It still needs some polish though. Right then, lets put my picking holes in things hat on…
“some more whitespace between the columns is needed”
You beat me to it. Not just there though, I think you need to be a bit more consistent with it’s use throughout. Some of the icons butt right up to the text, others have a small right-margin, then others have a bigger one. Some of the headings have a big top margin, some none at all.
The search form looks unfinished, with plenty of top/bottom padding and no left/right.
The blockquote style stands out a mile, shouting “look at me, I’ve got a red stripe”, which is inconsistent with the rest of the site.
Conversely, the main nav (home/tsg presents/contact) doesn’t stand out enough. Enlarging the clickable area on those links would improve matters, as would linking the logo back to the front page. To me, the RSS icon is less important than the nav and search, so I’d move it down the page a bit - and probably put the “What’s RSS?” link with it.
Personally I’d rethink the icons themselves too. The FamFamFam set a) doesn’t quite fit here, and b) is used heavily in a web app I use daily, so I’m fed up with it
As for the type, could you try something other than Arial? Perhaps Lucida Sans or Calibri (although the latter comes out smaller IME, IYSWIM, YMMV, HAND).
/removes hat, runs away sharpish!
November 27th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Cheers Olly, you’re a star. Another pair of fresh eyes is really important, thanks. Now run the other way so I can buy you a pint lol.
/getsHacking
November 27th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
No probs. BTW, the name field on the comment form is about 700 miles above where it should be in Safari 3
November 27th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
lol, I’ll have to fire up the Windows version of that and take a look-see *shudders*
November 28th, 2007 at 8:16 am