Google Helping to Tackle Wildfires in California - October 25th, 2007

Is there anything Google can’t do? Over the past few days Google Maps and Google Earth have been helping to collate images and news about the current wildfires tearing across Southern California.

Created by radio station KPBS, there is a live map of the California wildfires showing burn zones, evacuation zones, locations of safe areas and much more. There are also pictures of the area and constant Twitter updates to keep people completely up to date with what’s going on.

This kind of accessible up-to-the-minute reporting is something that particularly helps people in the Southern California area, and is something that would arguably not have been available just a few years ago.

It’s a great example of ‘Web 2.0′ in action and how much the internet and delivery of information has progressed in recent times.

Rik
SEO Programmer

Listen to this podcast

Posted in Accessibility|No Comments »

What’s The Best Web Page Layout Size? - August 7th, 2007

That’s one of the most disputed arguments in the web design world. Some developers will tell you without hesitating 800×600, whilst others prefer 1024×768. As technology advances and the variety of monitors’ configuration, it’s impossible to get your website looking the same in every platform, browser and screen resolution. Obviously, the common principle is to optimise for your target audience’s most common resolution.

Most people, including myself, are optimising for 800×600 to ensure that the web pages look consistent throughout different monitor sizes. In spite of this, why not optimising for 1024×768 which is currently the most popular used screen size?

There are 2 possible solutions for this:

Using liquid layouts based on percentages of the browser window’s size. They are flexible with the size of the windows as the user changes their window size. Liquid layouts use the screen space efficiently for most screen resolution or browser windows sizes.

Another common approach is creating a three column fixed layout optimised for both screen resolutions, where users with 1024×768 or bigger resolutions see the entire page and users with 800×600 screen resolution see only 2 columns. Obviously there some aspects worth considering such as the percentage of your visitors that use small screen resolutions and whether there are any elements that can be left out.

Tino
SEO Programmer

Listen to this podcast

Posted in Accessibility|No Comments »