As it is with most thing in life we are able to achieve greatness by standing on the backs of those who have come before, and building on their accomplishments. So after deciding to start this BLOG I needed to come up with a layout. I’m a big fan of liquid layouts, and not just because Jakob Nielsen says they are a good idea. While fixed layout’s do have some benefit, especially if you are really anal about layout, they don’t take advantage of everything the web has to offer. If I bought a 21″ inch monitor I want 21″ of content, not the 800 pixels of content that you think look best. The whole point of the web is to empower the user.
Once I had decided I was going to use a liquid layout, I was faced with the question of where to start. Do I design one from scratch, use a template or, a hybrid of the two and customize an existing template? I do a lot of work on the web and could have designed a custom template, but since this blog isn’t making me any money, that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. However I am fairly particular so an “off the shelf” template wouldn’t do either, so I’ll need a hybrid.
I’ve seen the debates between tables and CSS, and I think CSS is the way to go. Tables are meant to be used for tabular data, using them for layout is a bad idea. The problem arose just after the web became popular, and there was need for good designers. Problem was the only ones around, came from the print world. There’s nothing wrong with print people, but they have a problem if things don’t layout exactly as they planned, so they butchered tables to do this for them. Yes I’ve used tables in some of the websites I run, but I have my own reasons for doing it that way.
Ok so I wanted a CSS liquid layout design, the most obvious place to start was GLISH. I’ve tried it before, but it gets a little quirky from time to time. So I found this design from SSI Developer. I like headers and footers on my pages, so I went with the “Three Column Pixel Perfect with Header”. I then went through some modifications, monkeyed with the color, bought the image for the left hand corner, made a text logo for the header, and integrated the code from an existing blogger template. All in all it took about 4 hours start to finish.
Yes I have some changes in mind, and do plan on making some revisions down the road, but you need to start somewhere, and this was as good a place as any.
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