Mockup Home page - critiques?

satori · Post by **satori** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 10:47 am

Okay, so I bought Able Commerce 7 last week and have applied my design changes to it.

Here is a "MOCKUP" home page:
http://www.attachedtobaby.net

By mockup I mean I have it all working on my home computer, and just uploaded the rendered HTML, CSS, and images to a live site to test.

All links are disabled, as I've only uploaded the home page. I studied CSS all week to get everything to look the way I wanted.

My menu (in a different design) is here:
http://www.attachedtobaby.net/menu.htm

Any critiques, suggestions? I tested it on all browsers that I have here, I don't really care about very old browsers anymore. I did test it on Mac IE5.2, and aside from a few quirks, I think it would work on that too.

I'll get my "product page mockup page" up tonight.

compunerdy · Post by **compunerdy** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 10:56 am

It looks good.

My only gripe would be that I hate static width websites. They look pretty silly on a widescreen monitor.

satori · Post by **satori** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 11:02 am

That is my choice. I have alot of 24" monitors surrounding me, but I just get to have two browsers up instead of one wide one.

My target market is mothers that probably don't have 24" or 30" monitors, and if they do, hopefully they have two windows up like I do.

I myself don't like dynamic width monitors, as it is hard to read one very long line of text and find the next line.

All this is personal likes and dislikes though of course!

Just validated it:

This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 11:33 am

Wow.

Can you do my site too?

jmestep · Post by **jmestep** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:07 am

I like the static width. I've got a 22' monitor and most sites that expand don't look good on it and it's too hard to read the long lines of text also.

IndyTwoStep · Post by **IndyTwoStep** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:33 pm

I agree about static width.

Fluid width design was all the rage for a while, but static just works better.

IMO, it is better to design in static width because you eliminate variables & save yourself a lot of time on cross browser compatibility issues (getting CSS block elements to float correctly on IE, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc. and have to account for IE's box model hack, and all the issues that come along with it is hardly worth the trouble).

Designing static width puts control in the designer's hands, and many of my favorite websites are static. As everyone else said, having a widescreen does't affect me much, because all I do is restore the window size, and then size it so it takes up a portion of my screeen and gives me other workable space.

The only delima I have with static width is, when will it be ok to switch to 1024 standard, as 800 is a bit constrictive. I have designed sites where I do a 800 and 1024 layout, and let javascript test screen resolution and apply the correct css, but that just opens up a bunch of problems. with content layout from page to page. That is really my only gripe about static width sites, I hate when someone designs a static width site at some super wide resolution so it goes off most standard indow sizes and forces you to use the side scroll bar. That sucks.

Static vs. Fluid is really a matter of preference, but I believe static should always be used when practical. It is like the tableless css vs. table layout. If you are doing a tableless css layout all in the name of standard compliance... I think it is a lot of headache for little benefit.

As far as tables do go, when designing from scratch, I use the hybrid approach - one simple table to declare header, left bar, center content, (right bar if applicable), and footer. Then design the rest of the site using only CSS as much as possible... Again, IMO, it just works...