[thelist] design to look good at any resolution

[Shirley Kaiser (SKDesigns)]

Hi, Rudy,

Thanks so much! Yeah, I didn't go out for New Year's Eve, either. (I 
needed a quieter evening after spending the week at the hospital with my 
dad -- 2nd heart attack in 2 weeks, age 82....)

Back to the topic, though:
Wow, I can see what you mean about this post to I-Design. She certainly 
did a lot of research on screen resolutions. Fascinating information. 
Thanks again for more URL info.

Determining how to handle screen resolutions, like so many variabilities 
we deal with, can be an interesting challenge. I tend to design more 
liquid sites these days since they can shrink or expand according to the 
need. But there are many ways to work with this, too.

Another point here, too, is that we can't assume that people will be 
using a full size screen view for our pages, too. I'll have to look back 
at something I read on this, too, which showed a listing of browser 
default screen resolutions with facts and figures on this. (I hate to 
just toss out info without backing it up with proof when available. I 
think it's somewhere in the annotated listings at the WebsiteTips.com 
category on designing for accessibility, cross-platform, cross-browsers 
(http://www.websitetips.com/design/).

At any rate, my impression is that we still need to allow for these 
smaller screen resolutions (such as 640x480) even though the statistics 
show that the numbers of viewers are shrinking for the smaller ones, as 
it seems that plenty of people don't use a full screen view for looking 
at webpages, and it's preferable to avoid the horizontal scrolls.

I do think we need to find a balance here, and one that is within 
reason. For the most part these days I design more liquid sites that 
will expand and contract for a variety of resolutions. My latest bug, 
though, is that for a site like Websitetips.com at 
http://www.websitetips.com, there's a lot of text content that is also 
liquid, thus potentially expanding quite a bit. Only the main page has 
narrow text width that's divided into 2 columns. The expanded text 
content on the rest of the site, though, goes against what I've read and 
previously followed about keeping the text content width narrower to 
make for easier reading. I'm thinking of now changing the text content 
areas like this to be static with that narrow text content area. As a 
result, I'd either need to split up the content to more pages or make 2 
columns for text content on each of these pages.

In terms of usability, I think I ought to go for one narrower column 
split onto more pages than keeping the amount of content on a particular 
page split into 2 columns. I've started to look up some usability 
studies on reading two columns vs. one, etc. but haven't come up with 
anything solid enough yet.

I'd love to hear some feedback and impressions from others on this, too.

By the way, others on the list may not know that I'm the editor/owner of 
WebsiteTips.com that I mention above, so I'm not criticizing someone 
else's site, just my own. ;-)

Thanks, Rudy.

Warmly,
Shirley
-- 
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.
SKDesigns mailto:skaiser at skdesigns.com
Website Development http://www.skdesigns.com/
Pianist, Composer http://www.shirleykaiser.com/

rudy wrote:

>> Maybe my brain has taken the day off today...
> 
> 
> hi shirley
> 
> hey, i know the feeling, and i didn't even go out last night  ;o)
> 
> start here -- http://list.audettemedia.com/archives/i-design.html
> 
> choose december, then digest #052
> 
> all the best
> 
> rudy