Tristan BotlyTristan Botly

Personally I try to use 960 for the width. the argument for using 960 was it’s divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16 which means your grid options are endless, and of course it fits within the most popular 1024 width.

HOWEVER With the soon to be released I-Phone 4 working on an incredible 960 by 640 pixel maybe it is time to look at adjusting this slightly to accommodate the latest IPhone. 50 million I-Phones have been sold since it’s release in 2007 so the market for the new version is looking good.

Now of course people will say you should be building to work on multiple platforms with varying resolutions and to them I say try the real world!

Most graphic designers open up a default PSD file that is set to around 960, this is what they see and what the client sees to sign off. So a slight decrease to fit the frame of the IPhone will mean a horizontal IPhone 4 will be able to display your website in the original look with no horizontal scroll bars which for 20 pixels is just annoying.

I would be interested to know your thoughts…

A joke image on the issues caused by the Iceland Volcano going off, something which in no small part has effected me recently!

The image says:

Getting to work in Europe

You’re doing it right

I use excel all the time and it can be irritating trying to remember that nice little trick you used 3 years ago.

This page has a great breakdown of the most common and some not so common.

Excel Cheat Sheet

A provocative title, and certainly one the web developer community doesn’t hold but I want you to picture this for a moment:

• You own a business
• You started this company from the ground up and every dollar earned is 35 cents to pay your ex-wife/husband with
• You sell a high value product (above $1500’s to a very niche market)

Your web stats show this:

This is a real world example from a client of mine, the average time on one day for 5 users using IE6 was over 3 times as much as the average for the day.*

What would you do when your agency says we are planning on not supporting IE6 any more.

After all it was only 5 potential customers right?

VOTE NOW!

I will publish the result of the poll on my twitter and buzz so follow me to find out how it goes:
Follow me on Twitter
Follow me on Buzz

* Unfortunately at the moment we are lacking good goal data to see if these users are active in the buying process, I felt for a conversation starter though this was sufficient to post.

A great article from a website I follow.

It covers a few tips and tricks on table user interface, some are obvious which is by no means a bad thing as it is handy to have them all in one place. I know as I looked down the list I got a few ideas for my Homespace Project I am working on at the minute.

Here are the highlights:

Alternating rows styling
Make the table easy to read and follow

Full row selection
Ability to select the whole row and perform a task across it makes working on a daily basis faster

Table sections
Group similar data in a clear and easily manageable manner
Obvious but implemented correctly a busy page can be transformed into a working application

Sorting
Column sorting e.g. ascending price… VERY IMPORTANT

Filtering
Filter your results, I find now with the possibilities in javascript this is a great tool as I am now able to deal with so much information on one page. For me this replaces search.

Pagination
As far as I am concerned pagination is a non javascript replacement however this may be a view not held by many customers which may find my love of dynamic content irritating

Continuous scrolling
The idea of loading in content whilst the user scrolls, I love this but not sure if mass market users would rather avoid sites being too clever
It also might be the same as streaming video, it is fine but sometimes you just want the whole thing to load / jump to the relevant content. I would imagine visiting a site a second time and waiting till your item loads might actually be irritating

Fixed table header
Make the header follow you down the page, I don’t think this is done enough and I don’t believe there are any usability issues around it

Expandable Rows
This is a nice idea, making it easy to browse lots of content until you found the one you liked.

Row actions
This section is a must read, most sites now employ these techniques so it you are not up on it then you are missing out

So that is my view on the article, please check it out and I hope it helps get you thinking about a few ways to treat your next project.

Table UI Patterns Original Article

I thought this was a really fun and interesting way to display some nice facts about the giant Google.

Here were a couple of my favourity facts:

• Daily page views fr Google.com = 7.2billion
• Amount of data processed daily = 20PB
• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube
• Google Analytics usage on top 10,000 websites = 57%

Check out the whole really well designed artwork here.

This is not a true test of any ability but a great example of a fun viral game that people will link to e.g. me here

How can you not send a link when they call you an SEO Dark Lord lol.

Great thinking guys!

Take the SEOmoz quiz

A bit of an update on my plugin.

So far the plugin to view your wordpress pages in the admin section like a windows explorer style drop down has proved very successful.

I received some feedback that it was displaying strangley if you added your pages in a different order to how they eventually were displayed. This was due to my plugin not taking into account the menu order, the new version sees this fixed and so should now be ready to download.

If you find any further issues or have any ideas on how to improve it then please comment on the project page.

Download the latest version of my Navigate Pages Plugin for Wordpress here.

A simple way to detect whether the web browser you are using is IE 6, this way allows any version of IE 6 to be picked up.

I’m sure there is a clearer way to do this so please feel free to improve but this certainly works.


$(document).ready(function() {

ie6catch = $.browser.msie + $.browser.version;
if (ie6catch.indexOf("true6") == -1) {
alert("This is not Internet Explorer 6");
}
});


I needed this for my Comments Page and at the minute the feed appears to be formatted differently to other RSS feeds. This is due to them not offering a JSON format yet.

There is a great JQuery solution for this the Google Buzz Widget.
They say:
This is a jQuery widget for the brand new social network -Google Buzz- that you can embed anywhere to integrate your buzz stream into your page.

However if you want to get your Google Buzz XML Feed follow these easy steps:

• Use Firefox
• Visit the profile page of the person so in my case… Tristan Botly’s Google Profile
• On the right of the address bar you should see the familiar orange RSS icon, click that to load up the xml and copy the feed