Decisive

Gah, sometimes I swear I’m my own worst client.

On The Other Site (and I promise I’ll be letting it out into the wild soon – promise.) I’ve been working out how to get the necessary information into the bloody thing, and it was becoming more and more complex. Countries, Regions, Towns, and at least two other bits of information before we got to the crux of the matter, and so the page was hellish.

Mainly this was because I was trying to do it all in a way that makes sense for the long-term, and minimises the amount of data that’s repeated in the database. For instance, if you’ve got an address table, you don’t really want a buttload of records with the same town, county, and country – you’d want to have a “location” table that will hold those, so you can say in the address table “location=10”, and then in the location table, record ten has “town, county, country” in it. Makes sense.

Anyway, the way I’d done this was becoming incredibly complex, and so this morning I’ve been looking at it again, and figuring out better ways to do it. Well, by “better” I mean, of course, “simpler”- both from a coding point of view, and a usability one. All the same, it’s enough to make my head ache quite a lot.

The annoying bit is that I’d got it all to a point where it was actually pretty much working. It just took too long to get anything done, so the re-plan was necessary. And maybe when I develop things a bit more, I’ll come back to this way, and do it all with AJAX or something to make it nice to use. But I’m not convinced…

Thinking About… Page Width

In what I suspect may just turn out to be a theme on this stuff, page-widths are quite a bone of contention among web designers.

Basically there are two schools of thought – fixed-width and fluid . Fixed width is pretty self-explanatory – the page is designed to fit a certain size, say 800 pixels, or 1,000 , or another arbitrary figure. In general this is fine – the BBC does it this way, as does the Guardian, and many many others. It’s probably slightly more “standard” for commercial websites than fluid, but not by all that much.

Fluid, on the other hand, still tends to be used primarily on smaller-size (readership-wise) sites, blogs, that kind of thing. Not that it matters, but it’s also my general preference. Fluid widths fill the window, regardless of the size of that window. It doesn’t matter if it’s 600 pixels or 2,400 – the site expands to fit. D4D™ does it – if you’re lucky enough to have a dual-monitor set-up or similar, expand d4d to the full extent of the screen. Look, no blank space. It’ll shrink right down to about 450-490pixels before things break. That’s why I like fluid – because it doesn’t care whether you’re using a monitor that’s only able to use 800 pixels, or whether you’re all the way up at 2,400 (or more) or anywhere in between.

I suspect that a lot of it, as with colour, comes down to personal taste. The BBC site annoys me because it only uses half the window width I’ve got open. The Guardian annoys me for the same reason. However, people who like fixed-width (and again, I wonder if this is related to book or newspaper page widths being fixed, and thus “normal”) argue that if the text isn’t handle correctly in a fluid layout, it can end up being almost unreadable. And in fact I agree with this on occasion – if you’ve got lots of short paragraphs, they can look bloody awful in a fluid layout.

I suspect that the sites I’m currently working on will end up being fluid layouts – I’d rather see the space used for site content, instead of just being blank, wasted space. There’ll be space within the layout, though – I think that it’s the lack of space that can make a fluid layout feel cramped, and so I’ll be using as much space as I can for it.

We’ll see, when it comes to time to test it all out.