Website Resolution for Awards?

[Aignam]

What resolution is the best to use for the judging process? What resolution, rather, are the judges most likely to use? Should we all be safe and design for 800 by 600?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

i dont understand the judging requirments.. isnt FIRST all about being on the cutting edge of technology and using things to best of their abilities, not being confined to design for those who use 56k.. i think ppl should design sites to run on 1280x1024 at the least, but thats just my opinion

[Aignam]

Originally Posted by ToMMan b182

i dont understand the judging requirments.. isnt FIRST all about being on the cutting edge of technology and using things to best of their abilities, not being confined to design for those who use 56k.. i think ppl should design sites to run on 1280x1024 at the least, but thats just my opinion

FIRST helps us prepare for the future. A website being practical is more important than a website being flashy. Be pragmatic.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

so pretty much what u are saying is we have all this great new technology, but we arent going to take advantage of it?!.. thats pretty much saying ud rather drive a model T than an rx8

[Tom Bottiglieri]

^u can be practical in a higher resolution with nicer grphics and stuff like that.. but u will also be able to further the design of ur site asthetically(wrong spelling). when u design for a lower res when ppl look at it in a high res, everything seems so small and hard to comprehend, so pretty much what im saying is try to find a happy medium where everyone can be happy.(say, 1024by768)

[deltacoder1020]

also, some people will have their browser text size turned up, et cetera - not everyone likes looking at 12pt text on a 1600x1200 display.

Do what I do, and use CSS - that way, the page reflows itself for any resolution.

[Aignam]

Originally Posted by deltacoder1020

Do what I do, and use CSS - that way, the page reflows itself for any resolution.

Care to explain? I was thinking of making different resolution choices for the website from a splash menu...

[jonathan lall]

Great, this is what I was afraid of; now we're concentrating less on what we were doing for our sites, and more on playing to the judges. Inevitable I guess.

Ideally, websites should work in any resolution. To say that yours doesn't work with browser X or a certain resolution would be IMO copping out. Technology has nothing to do with it; if anything, it's actually the opposite. As deltacoder1020 mentioned, CSS can solve these problems, whether by making the page fluid (page reflow recalculated as the window changes size), or fixed at a low size. I intend to make print and low-capability stylesheet for other media for my websites when I get the time. But practically, I doubt catering to 640 x 480 is necessary. Oh, and I would rather drive a Model T than an RX 8.

[iamnafets]

He just says that because he designed his site for 800x600 rather than 600x800 (I somehow managed to forget the 200px nav bar) Oh well...make a flash only site, have everyone yell at you, then laugh because if you don't embed it in an object, it will automatically adjust and antialias from there.

...or, spend extra time making your site accessable to blind people, people who are colorblind, people without a right arm, or without working fingers, people who can't hear, don't have monitors, can't watch flashes without getting seizures, lack a web browser, people who like the first logo (even if it doesn't fit), people who care how much of your site is "non-text", and finally, judges of the FIRST website award.

"I should turn this into a poem." ~ Stefan Mai

[Aignam]

I asked the question assuming that the FIRST judges, those whom will be judging the Website Award this year, are significantly experience with websites and know what is entailed in an effective website. Webdesigners design for their visitors. Obviously, the FIRST Judges' approval is a good sign that you are on the path to becoming a successful webmaster. Why not design to please them? They are my audience, for all intensive purposes, as well as anyone out there who may stumble across my team's website. If they approve, then it is fair to say that most others will.

[jonathan lall]

Now now, let's not take this out of context; I'm simply noting the huge shift in priorities for all the teams' websites. Nobody's saying it's dumb to cater to the judges. That would be dumb to say.

Stefan, I can absolutely guarantee you will have all kinds of trouble with a site like what you describe; I doubt the judges would like those either. Especially if they don't have IE6 SP1 on WinXP with 1024 x 768 resolution, Flash 6, Microsoft Java, Javascript, a highspeed connection, sound on, and popups enabled. I'm jus' sayin'. Why not make your site a big picture? Or better yet a big Flash animation; save the search engines the trouble of indexing your pages. I think you're missing a few key points to the idea of HTML. The way I see it, If you want Photoshop, get a Deviantart page. Otherwise, make a website! There's no doubt what you propose looks nice when it works, but that isn't enough.

[evulish]

If I were a judge for the webpages, I would most definitly see how small the content could go. So many sites break when you make them smaller. The content goes all over the place because it wasn't made correctly. Even though not many people run their web browsers at 50px x 50px, it can show if you made some mistakes. Personally, I criticize a whole bunch of websites a day because I hang around an HTML channel on IRC where alot of web designers ask for advice. The ABSOLUTE FIRST thing you need to work on is CONTENT. I don't think that can be stressed enough! Content first, pretty fun stuff second. I think the best thing (design-wise) is the flexibility of a site. I have access to: IE, Netscape (win/lin), Mozilla(win/lin/osx), Konqueror, Galeon, Safari, IE 5.2 for Mac, and Opera. I know it's near impossible to make a complex site work in all those (especially IE 5.2 for Mac *shakes head*) but it should be some-what close. You should never make a website browser-specific. Also, in my humble opinion, sites fully-designed in flash are bad. Even if you have an HTML 'back-up' site, it's usually missing content or isn't taken care of. Another warning is that a lot of people have javascript disabled. A few people also have cookies disabled and don't have Java installed.

Some of the best sites are the simplest. You don't need lots of fancy graphics, animations, or sound when you have a nice design.

(Also, Kudos in advance to the teams that made their pages w3c compliant! )

[deltacoder1020]

even more kudos to those that are w3c xhtml 1.1 and CSS compliant

as evulish stated, the best pages are those that work cross-browser. therefore, try to use a minimum of javascript, except for the well-known functions (alerts & confirms are fine, et cetera), as different implementations of javascript can been the bane of compatibility. also, as far as resolutions go, again I recommend CSS. If you use relative font and content area sizes, CSS will help your site to automatically scale to whatever the viewing screen size. If you want more info on using CSS, you might try www.htmlhelp.com (note, this site also has a comprehensive reference of HTML tags and attributes). Just remember that some of the "cool" stuff CSS can do (different color scrollbars, et cetera) is only implemented by some browsers, by which I mean IE.

However, using CSS it's possible to do some things with much less than it would otherwise take. Take rollover effects, for example. By using the CSS a:link and a:hover attributes, you can easily make a link change color, background, or style when the mouse is over it. You can also use CSS for TABLE-tag like layout, but without tables (which are notorious for problems when it comes to scalability).

finally, server-side languages are the ultimate in cross-browser compatibility! - as long as the html the output works in all browsers, you don't need to worry about the functionality working

[DarkAlex]

I suggest also incorperating Javascript with your CSS as is shown in the following documents:
http://www.geocities.com/worldwidewangout/dajava.js
http://www.geocities.com/worldwidewangout/1024.css

I suggest just using Javascript's screen.width element, as shown above, to call different CSS documents to format the text differently based on screen width. Common screen widths that come to mind right now are 600, 800, 832(For Mac Users), 1024, 1200, and 1600. Just create a separate CSS document for each size and have the Javascript call it. Put the Javascript in a .js file called from each page so that you can use it on multiple pages, but remember that you need differing amounts of ../ depending on where in the file structure you call the javascript from. To that end you will also need one Javascript for every file level you have, but all can be stored and referrenced on the first file level.

Here is the code to reference the javascript:
<script src="dajava.js"></script>

For about all of the information you will need on CSS go to www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/master.html

Another useful code:
This code will auto-maximize the window of the user and is pretty backwards compatible:
<script>
window.moveTo(0,0);
var widt=screen.width;
var heig=screen.height - 28;
window.resizeTo(widt,heig);
</script>

CSS will take care of most of your formatting for you. The other way to do this is to simply make one website for every screen width you want to be compatible with, but that is a pain and, well, a pain. You can also use the screen.width element to resize pictures.

[deltacoder1020]

i'd recommend against using the auto-maximize script, as most people don't like their browser window being changed by someone/thing else. also, it does not truly maximize the window, but instead changes the size, which means that "un-maximizing" it can be confusing for people who think it is maximized.

with the right CSS, you shouldn't need different scripts for different resolutions - again, use relative specifiers instead of specific ones, such as 10% instead of 100px