Datasheet

Don’t worry, you bought the right book. This isn’t Professional Plagiarism we’re writing here. However,
establishing and maintaining an awareness of current Web design trends is one of the keys to improving
your own craft. the most rewarding part of working and designing online is that there is always some-
thing new to learn, another excellent resource you’ve not discovered yet. If we’re feeling stumped by
how to style a particular page element, uninspired by a corporate color palette, or just generally
strapped for ideas, then seeing how other designers work in the face of adversity is always a welcome
aid. So, whenever we start to feel as though we’re pushing up against the constraints of our own design
skills, we spend a bit of time browsing for inspiration.
This browsing could occur on-line or off-line. Whether walking through a museum, browsing through a
magazine stand, or surfing through some well-designed Web sites, the medium you pick is less impor-
tant than exposing yourself to well-reasoned, well-executed designs for an hour or two. Thankfully,
we’re able to keep that hour or two from turning into eight or nine by visiting a number of well-known
design portals, or online communities dedicated to evangelizing some of Web design’s brighter spots.
Over the past year, a number of sites evangelizing CSS-based Web designs have cropped up. The most
recent addition is Stylegala (
www.stylegala.com/). It features a design as compelling as the sites it
covers. Each featured site in the gallery is accompanied by some thoughtful critiques by Stylegala’s cre-
ator and designer-in-residence, David Hellsing. The site’s users are allowed to vote for favorites within
the gallery, as well as provide additional commentary. The discussions are always interesting, and the
sites are all fine examples of what the Web (and CSS) can do.
Kaliber10000 (
www.k10k.net/) isn’t so much a community as an authority, providing a near-dizzying
array of design-related news, tips, and tutorials on an even more dizzying basis. Founded in 1998 and
staffed by some of the brightest designers in the industry, Kaliber10000 provides everything from screen-
shots of user desktops, to links to Flash-heavy portfolio sites. K10K won’t just rid you of your design
block — rather, it will help you obliterate it.
Selecting a Layout: Fixed or Liquid
Often characterized as one of the unholy wars of Web design, the debate between fixed or liquid layouts
is the designer’s version of “Chevy versus Ford”— each side has its fierce loyalists, with very little mid-
dle ground between the two poles. As we begin building our site, it’s worth acknowledging this heated
debate, so that you might choose a method that best fits your needs and those of your site.
Fixed Width
A fixed (or “ice”) layout is one whose width is constant and unchanging. No matter how large or small
the user’s browser window becomes, the actual width of the page’s content area will remain, well, fixed.
The benefit to this approach is that it lends ultimate control to the designer, who always knows the
dimensions of the canvas he or she is designing upon. For professionals coming from a print back-
ground, this is approach is a rather intuitive one. If the width of the content area is a fixed constant, then
a designer can hang perfectly sized graphics upon that canvas with pixel-perfect precision.
However, the success of a fixed-width design is contingent upon an assumption: namely, the designer’s
assumption of the width of the user’s browser window. Should the browser’s width ever become nar-
rower than that of the page, then a horizontal scroll bar will appear, forcing the user to manually scroll
the page from left to right to see the site as its designer intended (see Figure 1-9).
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The Planning and Development of Your Site
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