My web design work has been criticised in the past; the meat of it was (and here I summarise from memory) that all my sites look the same: fixed-width, centred, usually two columns, header and footer, horizontal navigation. Hearing this stings. Stings because it impugns my abilities; stings because it’s true.
I’m not going to be picky about the details of the claim; just look at my work and judge for yourself. For the purposes of this article, suffice to say it’s true in its essentials. All my sites look the same, or near enough.
A quick aside, on why they all look the same. This isn’t an excuse; it just gives some background. As I wrote here, I used to design very differently. Since that time, maybe three years ago, I’ve improved a lot technically. My knowledge of W3C standards, CSS, and the basic process of web design have increased immeasurably. Visually, however, my work hasn’t progressed as much as perhaps it ought to. This isn’t totally unreasonable; web design is far from the only thing I do, this last year has seen me focus much more on my degree, and perhaps technical understanding has been accrued at the price of a loss of visual panache. Still, it seems clear that there is truth in the charge: my work is often unexciting and predictable.
Anyway, needless to say I got fed up with this state of affairs. Design should be both appropriate and interesting, and I was falling down on the ‘interesting’ criterion. When I started work on a couple of new projects last month, I wanted to do a new layout. Still centred, but not just “two columns, fixed-width”. I was shooting for a layout that would be fixed-width above a certain browser window size, and liquid below it. It would be able to handle a wide variety of resolutions and window sizes with ease, the text would be resizeable and the layout would be written in such a way that resizing wouldn’t easily break it. After a lot of work, I had it all figured out. It looked great, resized well, and worked just fine for a bunch of resolutions. Needless to say, it didn’t work in Internet Explorer.
Knowing that there was a fix out there—Roger Johanssen’s ‘elastic’ layout (which is in use on his site)—I went on holiday fairly confident that when I got back, I could fix it.
I couldn’t. It still worked ok in Firefox, and the maximum width worked in Internet Explorer, but it wouldn’t resize. I was stuck with a fixed-width layout in IE. Trying out Roger’s site in IE, I could see that this was a limitation of the code, and of the browser, not a mistake on my part. My layout wasn’t going to work. Given that Internet Explorer has such a massive majority share in the browser market, and that most prospective visitors to the site I was developing the layout for would be using it, it was obvious that my starry-eyed visions were going nowhere. The time it took to build and maintain the layout, given all the IE hacks and complex nature of the code, just wouldn’t be worth it.
So, I’m going back to fixed-width. It’s not all bad; I know the techniques inside-out, and the final site will, I think, be good enough. Still, there are pangs of regret. It’s painful when you try to push back the frontier of your capabilities, and fail. Maybe in a few years things will be different, but I don’t know if I’ll even be working in this business then. I guess we’ll see. Until then, I’m going to have to find a different way to be interesting. Constraints are often what brings out innovation, so perhaps in dealing with this one, I’ll find a new and better path. Let’s hope so.
