Why do people make web design difficult?

After seeing some of the more, interesting, submissions for the site redesign contest that Cid is having, I have to make a thread stating the two most blatently violated rules of website design. Why is it so hard to follow these rules?

1. Web page are viewed in more than one resolution - when you are designing web pages please view your pages in different resolutions other than the 1024 x 768 that you run your monitor in. A lot of people you different resolutions ranging from 800 x 600 to 2000+ x 1500+. And if you don't want to make the web page viewable in the extremes, like 800 x 600, then offer a way for the user to view the page so it isn't difficult for them, i.e. don't set all of your table columns at a percentage width so that when the page is shrunk the table is 20 screens high.


2. There are browsers other than IE - Please learn to develop pages that work in browsers other than IE, or at least make them appear close to normal. Typically if you can get your page to work in both IE and Mozilla, then it will work well enough in just about every other browser.

So far as the first one, what is the solution? There is no obvious answer. You can make your site stretch to take up some percentage of the width of the screen. Say 90% or even 100%. Then it will resize itself dynamically to fit any monitor size. But if your screen is very wide, your site will look very stretched. It's hard to design a layout that can look good 640 pixels wide and 2000 pixels wide. Or, you can hard-code the width to be something less than 750 pixels wide. But if you use a very large resolution, you will be wasting a good percentage of screen real estate. I'd say the latter is the better solution for the most part, but only because gigantically-wide monitors aren't very popular (yet).

I agree that there isn't an easy solution, I just wish that people would recognize that there are other resolutions out there than the 1024 x 768 that they view AOL in. I also agree that you can't accomodate all resolutions, but if you treat the range of resoutions like a bell curve it's not too hard to find a layout and style that will accomodate most everyone.

It is very hard to code a site so it can span large and small resolutions, however hard coding can be annoying, I suppose it all depends how much text you have that you can use to stretch across.

I'll give two examples:

For the hard coded one there is EoFF, it is hard coded to fit in a 800x600 browser, this is very good for that particular site as it does not really have reams and reams of text on each page.

For the more strectchy kind (I call it animorphic because I'm just strange) you need reams and reams of text, so a writing site like Loki 7 would probably be perfect for that :D


And yes I think most sites should work in all browsers, but I also think that sites should show which browsers they have been tested in so you know if you should avoid that site if it hasn't been tested in anything other then IE. Thats just an opinion though :D

1024x768 is the only real resolution.

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Originally Posted by Lindy

1024x768 is the only real resolution.

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Your right it is the standard now, but for how long?

Laptops make me sad because they run mostly on 1280 x 1024, and I don't see how it can work when they have a smaller screen than my monitor.

Besides, if it's lower than 1024, then things look too big, and bigger than 1024 things look too small.

I suppose, running say, graphics design you'd need a big screen to handle lots of things at once.

But still...

Don't forget to make sure the designs look acceptable in lynx/links2 browsers :D

As for the screen resolution one, is't it possible to just hardcode the side bar widths only, and let the width of the main content freeflow? :p Is there a minimum width you can set on the freeflow area to stop weird things happenning in too narrow a window? Plus, not everyone uses browsers full-screened (or even the same size window borders/scrollbar size/toolbars etc. etc.), so you can't assume a certain window size for someone running at 1024x768 :p

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Originally Posted by Farah

is't it possible to just hardcode the side bar widths only, and let the width of the main content freeflow? :p

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Thats what my site does :D

Also if you design it to work in 800x600 your usually fine if they make the window smaller as most people do use 1024x768 or bigger now :D

Center the page and make it fit in 800x600 or 1024x768. I have a 1280x1024 resolution, and I still make all my pages fit a 1024x768 resolution (sometimes even 800x600). Not many people have a 2048x768 resolution (they have monitors that are actually double width?), so why should I pander to the minority?

I find hard coding table width and height to be most effective. Making them a percentage is stupid, because if you make the window size really small (like 1/4 of your screen), everything looks out of place.

Why don't you people just make webpages which conform to government standards?

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Originally Posted by Immortal

Why don't you people just make webpages which conform to government standards?

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Crap and uninformative? Maybe thats just my government :D

I'll tell you why people make them not work in any browser but IE.

Because Mozilla users constantly drone and drone on about how Firefox is better and therefore their penis is bigger as a result, yada yada yada. So people like to prove how silly they are :cool:

Quote: Originally Posted by Psychotic I'll tell you why people make them not work in any browser but IE. Because Mozilla users constantly drone and drone on about how Firefox is better and therefore their penis is bigger as a result, yada yada yada. So people like to prove how silly they are :cool:

http://forums.eyesonff.com/images/smilies/smash.gif