The design of a website is an amazing thing, so I thought I’d share some of my method when it came to developing my new business site, Cozy Cabbage. It’s not complete, yet, but I’ll link when it’s finished.
The first thing I wanted to talk about was the content.
When I was writing about myself, and about the sites I’ve made, and drawing up what it means for someone to employ me (in a much less hokey-sounding way, of course, than it seems as I write these words right now), I realized I hated to use ‘I’ in my sentence structure. I suppose there was just something a bit too personal, in that; something, also, that might suggest very human flaws. On the other hand, I couldn’t exactly say ‘we’ and ‘our’, because it was only me.
In the end, I settled on using none of that at all, and I realized how fun and challenging it is to write something like that. “My services include–” No, I can’t say ‘my’. I say things like, “Work is done on a weekly basis,” instead of, “I do work on a weekly basis.” This shifts the active noun to the work, instead of to me, which I think really brings it out. It’s one of those things I hadn’t consciously noticed until I did it by accident.
The rest of the content is pretty simple: A very brief description of who I am, just in case people want to know. They’re there to find someone to make a webpage for them, so I’ll get right to the details: Samples, to let them know what kind of work I do (nothing great, at the momet — I have to completely redo a site I haven’t touched since last year), then what I’ll do if hired. I’m then adding a longer ‘about’ at the end, which outlines my work ethic and personal co-operation attitudes. There’s a little footer with some legal whatevers. On the top of the page is my logo, title, and three links: The main page, sample sites, and my HTML business card. In place of a contact sheet, I have a buy button. The buy button just won’t do, past this moment. I’ll end up making an actual order form.
On the design end, things were a bit different and mostly mundane. The original idea was to use cabbage and make the site ‘cozy’. I’m not sure how I intended to make it look cozy, but I’ll probably end up trying within the next couple of days. For now, it’s somewhat fresh and not too shabby. The site is very vertical, with improper use of sections below the header, and no sidebar, but I’ll probably get around to that next.
Overall, I just had a bunch of trouble with those floats, which you may have read a few days ago.
Another thing I want to talk about is fluid widths. I haven’t started on grids, yet, but there’s always been something disagreeable with fixed widths. Lately, I’d been keeping my browser at 640 wide, because I can easily set the window to a third or a half of my screen. Once I started looking at all these design blogs, it became quickly apparent that I’d have to switch to 960, though I still have a small horizontal scrollbar.
So I’ve decided that even 800×600 is too large, and it should comfortably fit down to about 300 pixels or so. I end up using variations on max-width and min-width and width percentage, which ends up giving me a great deal of control. If I wanted to use several divs inside each-other, I could even give the box a tremendously flexibly design. I could probaly make it shrink or grow as you increased your browser window. The next step would be to strategically place floats so that you get an extra column if you have a wide enough window. At the moment, you just get some more whitespace, which is always welcome.
I also try to keep my images scaled, because I don’t use full-page zoom, and want to design for others who don’t. The problem with this is images that have percentage width can’t seem to scale with text. I’ve been trying to work my way around it, but I may just have to choose one or the other.I could possibly set a maximum size with an EM-sized div, and then size the actual image with percentage. The max-size on the image, of course, would be set to about 200% of the image’s file dimensions, so it doesn’t become too grainy.
And I haven’t even started on the event layer, or whatever javascripting is called. I’ll also put some server-side stuff in, as well.
I’m researching Python and Django. It looks interesting.