Designing websites for a living, you not only have to know how to design, code the mark-up, keep up on the latest technologies and languages but you also have to keep an eye on things such as browser share and screen resolutions. I was just over at Market Share by Net Applications to check up on screen resolutions. It would seem that designing for 800×600 can now be a thing of the past. According to their numbers, 1024×768 is the dominating resolution these days.
| Screen Resolutions | Percentile |
|---|---|
| 1024 x 768 | 45.59% |
| 1280 x 800 | 14.20% |
| 1280 x 1024 | 12.83% |
| 800 x 600 | 7.50% |
| 1440 x 900 | 5.39% |
| 1680 x 1050 | 3.35% |
| 1152 x 864 | 3.20% |
| 1280 x 768 | 1.79% |
| 1920 x 1200 | 1.11% |
So what does all of this mean? Well for starters it means I need to do a bit more redesign for my site and blog. It also means it’s time to adjust the width of standard designs in the future. I for one will start out with a blank canvas set at 960px for fixed-width designs. Unless, of course, the design dictates that something narrower is called for. Plus as Cameron Moll states, it’s a great width for working with grids because it’s so easily divisible.
I’m a big fan of tools to help me with my work, especially if they’re web-based. I have great love for the Firefox ‘Web Developer’s‘ extension but I just came across a tool today that I’m quite excited about; It’s called Design and it’s a Javascript bookmarklet that helps with measurement and alignment in web design.
Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.
Below are some screenshots of the bookmarklet in action.
Yes, I’m obviously infatuated with Wordpress right now. What can I say I’m definitely smitten. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion that took place last month over at ZDNet entitled “WordPress vs. an army of clunky content management systems.” Basically the author ponders why so many companies roll out custom CMS software when Wordpress and other open source options are available and, in my and the author’s opinion, probably better written than in-house CMS’s.
At ZDNet we use WordPress for blogs, but in previous positions I’ve almost always had some custom built creation that usually stinks. Sure, these CMS systems may have started out as standard, but sooner or later they turn into this Frankenstein creation. And lookout below if the guy that cooked up the code ever leaves. If there’s an open source option that has rich features why would you spend time building the same thing?
Of course I have an opinion on why so many in-house developers are against using open source software. I think part of the reason is that the developers may not be too familiar with PHP. Most of these folks are Microsoft certified so most of the stuff is going to be written in ASP… to date you don’t see a lot of open source ASP software out there on the net. I actually had one Microsoft certified developer tell me PHP would be dead within a year—that was 2-3 years ago now and he was fired before the year was up anyway.
I think it also comes from a fear of losing one’s worth in the marketplace. If a company has all these highly-paid Microsoft certified developers on staff and suddenly you bring in open source, why do you need them? I think open source software is a perfect compliment for small to medium sized businesses and particularly non-profits. Instead of spending large chunks of money for people to reinvent the wheel, they could go with available solutions that wouldn’t cost them a dime.
But of course, not everyone is web or business savvy and may not know there are options available to them in the first place. Which is why as web designer’s we must go forth and plant the open source seed. Now I’m sounding like Johnny ‘Web Designer’ Appleseed.
It took some doing but I’m finally up to date with my Wordpress installation. I had to go from 2.1 to 2.3 and let me tell ya, some of the template tag changes weren’t fun to deal with. One of the things I found the most difficult to deal with was for my link categories in the footer and the link page. Prior to the upgrade I was using the template tag ‘get_links’ but of course that has now changed to ‘wp_list_bookmarks’. Where I wasn’t clear from the codex was how to get rid of the category title that Wordpress wants to automatically produce. So without further ado, a little tutorial on how to do this properly.
Arguments you must have to make the title null:
< ?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&title_li='); ?>Categorize must be set to 0 and title_li should be included as shown to get a null title.
My name’s Jen; I’m a cynical, sarcastic, ex-drummer who is fond of dark humor. I've held way too many factory & retail jobs but finally found my calling one Christmas holiday in a dark, musty basement. I am now a CSS & XHTML web standards looney and can be found daily—when I’m not at my Mac—at the local fair-trade coffee shop buying an iced-soy mocha no matter the temperature.
I am also the owner of Pop Stalin Design specializing in CSS & XHTML web design as well as custom WordPress themes.
