Andy Chase

I’m taking a break from my module development frustrations and turning my attention to design. It’s been quite a while since I actually designed a site from top to bottom, versus taking an existing theme like Kubrick or Bonsai and fiddling with colors and a graphic or two.

It’s hard work to style every last class and ID that a CMS gives you, and to do it in such a way that your overall site looks like it just came out of Adobe Illustrator, with every color deliberately chosen and every graphic placed just-so.

I’m going to give it a shot… there’s no reason I can’t have a CMS and a nice looking site, as long as I’m willing to spend the extra time and effort to cover the small details.

Looking around at “model” web sites in the first half of 2007, designs with fixed-width, centered content areas are very much de rigeur. It makes sense from a design standpoint; it’s usually much easier to control how a design behaves when you don’t have to worry about stuff sliding all over the place or wrapping strangely when the browser window expands or contracts.

What I don’t get is why it’s fashionable to make your main content area so damn skinny… even sites who look like they’re targeting a minimum resolution of 1027x768 seem to use two sidebars at 175+ pixels apiece! With another 50-100 pixels’ worth of padding on either side, that doesn’t leave much more than 500 pixels for your content, which is arguably the most important element of your design. As larger monitors get cheaper and resolution widths start getting into the 1200-1600 pixel range, that seems like a terrible waste of space. A List Apart gets away with it because their font size is rather small, but sites that drink the Web 2.0 kool-aid and use large fonts with lots of whitespace make you scroll endlessly. It looks nice at a glance, but the constant scrolling is annoying, especially when there are gaping whitespace voids on either side of the design.