The Anatomy Of Liquid Layouts (Part 1)

Liquid layouts have been around for quite some time. Some while ago it was thought that liquid layouts are dead. But liquid layouts are far from dead. Designers have shown that when implemented properly liquid designs can look as beautiful as fixed width layouts.

What are liquid Layouts?
As the name suggests liquid layouts are fluid and flexible. In liquid layouts widths are defined in percentages instead of pixels. The characteristic which makes liquid layouts special is that the layout scales with the size of the browser. So if you resize the browser the layout will resize accordingly.

So whats the big deal?
Liquid designs are very helpful in making the site accessible. These days there are so many diverse ways to access a site. People use different screens, resolutions, browsers, operating systems and even devices to view websites. Liquid layouts ensure that the layout of a site doesnt distort even when viewed in different resolutions.

Fixed Width
Fixed width layouts are made keeping a particular screen resolution in mind. They have fixed dimensions The layouts can at times look undersized over oversized if viewed from different screen resolutions. For example a site designed for 1024 x 768 px would distort when viewed from 800 x 600 px resolutions.
There are many advantages of using fixed widths, which make them so popular. They give the designer more control over the structure of the site.

This is the Part I of this post. I am working on the part two of this post which will feature the implementation of liquid layouts and some other stuff :)

Orkut: Send Scrap(Spam) To All

I agree that Orkut doesn't stand against Myspace or Facebook, but still it has been my social network of choice because most of my friends are on it.

In Orkut, friends can write stuff to each other in the form of scraps. Over the past few weeks some people have unofficially implemented a "scrap all friends" feature. The problem with this feature is that they just made life easier for all the spammers on orkut. Over the past few days I have received all sorts of spam scraps, ranging from buying used laptops to getting free domain names. Plus these scraps come with an advertisement to make people join the community of the creator of this feature.

If Orkut is not going to come up with an official version of this feature then they shouldn't allow these to spring up.

Beginning Ruby On Rails

I have been developing sites using PHP and MySQL for the past 2-3 years. But lately the upsurge of Ruby On Rails has turned my interest towards it. I have started learning ruby from various sources. I have joined a course by Ruby learning , I would like everyone to check it out because I guess its a great way to kick start rubying. Although it doesnt teach rails but still I think getting the basics of ruby is very important bef0re jumping into rails.

Big Backrounds aren't that BIG

Many of the so called design gurus, I guess, have started a new trend in the web design. Here is a small list of sites which follow this "big background" trend.

• Horizontal Wall
• JustinBird
• NDesign-Studios
• Next2Friends
  
• Squwak
• Webdesigner Wall
• WhatPulse

These designs certainly "look good". But the main purpose of web design isn't making sites "look good". The main purpose of web design is to assist the user in meeting the his objective from the site. Many a times, attractive looking backgrounds may not be as handy as a simple plain background and many times it is.

Every site has an objective. The main purpose of web design is to help the user meet those objectives with relative ease. For example the main purpose of a portfolio site would be to show off the persons skills. But a blog or a news portal may not have the same objective. The purpose of these sites is the content.

My opinion on these abstract-big-backgrounds depends upon the kind of page they are used on. Sites in which content is the objective, the background should blend beautifully and not strike out. Because if it does so then the content wont be the priority instead the background would become more prominent. On a portfolio page, the content isn't the prime objective of the designer, its a means for him to show off his work and so a decorated background certainly makes the design look beautiful.

What do you think of this trend? Post your opinions. I would love to hear from you all.

New Design : Pulse Exhiliarated

Pulse Exhiliarated is a design that I had created for a design competition hosted by a site called whatpulse about 5 months ago in June. I wanted to upload it but due to my studies and stuff I never got the time. Nevertheless its now up for you all to download. It follows the web standards. Now go ahead and download it and put it on your website :)

Some of its cool features are

• Valid HTML 4.01 and CSS.
• Tabbed navigation
• Great support for tabular data
• Beautiful Forms
• Support for blog-like interfaces
• And many more...

You can download it from : OpenWebDesign

Create "Smart Links" that dont suck

How many times have you come across a link like:

http://example.com/Stuff?id=dcv668&act=8v_20dsf23

Let me ask you something, can you get any idea of what the link is about? Can you type the link by yourself? I am sure most of you will answer 'no' to both the questions. Clearly these links 'suck' and so as webmasters its our duty to create 'smart' links.

The rise of dynamic sites has made it convenient for new users to create their own sites. These dynamic blogging platforms and other CMS(like Wordpress and PHP-nuke etc.) have made the option of building a site open for those, who don't know much about web development.

I have nothing against these CMS as they are only making the net a better place but I think one big inconvenience these sites create is the automatically generated senseless links created by such sites. These links are really confusing, they use weird characters(+, ? etc) and numbers which make no sense. The user has no idea what page he is being sent to till he actually reaches it and he wouldn't dare to remember or even type it as they are sooo big. And seeing the rate at which the Internet is expanding, there is a need to make cleaner links to reduce the complexity that may arise due to large volumes of sites and links.

In my opinion links should be self-explanatory for the convenience of the user. They should be

• Descriptive of the content
  
• Easy to remember
• Guessable
• And if possible short
• Sans unnecessary usage of symbols and numbers
  

These are the characteristics of what I call 'smart links'

New Design : Opaque Green

Good news. I had uploaded one of my old designs "Opaque Green" on OpenDesign it has been approved and can be downloaded. I had made the layout more than a year ago for my personal site but never used it. Some of its features are:

• Accessibility
• Valid Code
• Cross Browser Compatibility
• Light weight
• Easy to edit

You can download it from:
OSWD
Open Design

My other design hasn't been approved yet because there was some problem with the design queue on Open Designs but I'll put it here as soon as it is approved.