This phoku is glad for what it can get
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Archive for June, 2008
This phoku is too tired to care
Friday, June 13th, 2008
Elegant 2 column layout
Thursday, June 12th, 2008Based on a design developed by snook.ca (a great web design site), which creates a 2-column layout with the page elements in a sensible, semantic order in the source, I’ve come up with this variant, which is pretty much the same, but allows for more flexibility in header design. Seems to work ok in safari, firefox and ie all the way back to v5.01. See it in action.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Untitled Page</title>
<html>
<title>Efficient 2 column layout</title>
<style>
.wrapper {width:600px; height: 50em;background:lime;position:relative;}
.main {width:500px; float:right;height: 40em;background:red;}
.header{width:600px;position:absolute;height:5em;background:teal;top:0; left:0;}
.content {width:500px;height:40em;background:green;position:absolute; top:5em;}
.nav {width:100px; float:left; height: 40em; background:black; margin-top:5em;}
.footer {width:600px; clear:both;height:5em;background:cyan;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="main">
<div class="header">
</div>
<div class="content">
</div>
</div>
<div class="nav">
</div>
<div class="footer">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The Nielsen OK/Cancel dilemma solved
Friday, June 6th, 2008As this blog is merely a pretext to fill a web design portfolio website with regular content, I suppose I should knuckle down and write something related to the day job.
Jakob Nielsen, as well as being a good candidate for a Bond villain, is, according to many, the world’s leading authority on website usability, and as such I reckon he’s a good egg.
Contrary to what you would expect his website isn’t – in my humble opinion – very easy to use. The trouble is there’s very little sense of hierarchy, or use of visual clues. One of the golden rules of usability is that sticking to conventions tend to make things easier for the user, and he doesn’t make his navigation look different enough to ordinary content.
Also, despite writing a regular column on web usability, it’s infuriating that he does not publish a feed of this column, thus making his website more unusable still for RSS reader user s (which surely make up a higher percentage of his readership, given the subject he writes about appeals to people with an interest in all things good and webby). (Fortunately, somebody has used their initiative and put it right for him with this feed).
Anyway, one of his latest columns, on whether to put ok to the left of cancel or vice versa on web forms (the dilemma is that non web applications on apple put the buttons the other way round to windows) got me thinking about whether it’s possible to detect he operating system of a visitor, and change whether the buttons are floated left or right, depending on the OS, which would eliminate the problem.
And it turns out it is possible. One day maybe I’ll follow this post up with some example code.
This phoku is worried about smudges
Friday, June 6th, 2008
There’s something very wrong with the world…
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008… when you type a text message to simply say “ta”, and your phone assumes you mean to say “U2″.
That probably means (though I hope to god it doesn’t) that people are more likely to talkabout Bono than they are to express their gratitude in an efficient way.
This phoku thrives on activity
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
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