Category Archives: Design

Getting Around IE’s Lack of Min-Width Support

Min-width is a useful CSS property that, as it’s name suggests, sets the minimum width of an element to a specific pixel width (or em or whatever). It’s very useful.

The problem? Microsoft. Internet Exploder doesn’t support the property. Instead of ranting about Microsoft’s pathetic browser, I’ll skip to the solution…

First, make sure you have an IE-specific stylesheet to put all you IE hacks in. It makes it easier to manage things, and it makes sure hacks like this don’t stop your CSS from validating. (Believe me, this one will.) Include it in your page head like so:

<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="ieislame.css" type="text/css" media="all" /><![endif]-->

Next, add something along the lines of this to the file:

#mydiv { width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 850? "850px": "auto" ); }

Just replace both instances of “850” with the minimum width you prefer.

Not too hard, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

Design Spotlight: Del.icio.us 2.0

The popular social bookmarking site Del.icio.us redesigned over the past week. Overall they’ve kept a similar look, and haven’t lost any of the simplicity. It’s more polished looking, and probably more usable. Oh, and they’ve dropped the dots from the URL, becoming Delicious.com.

JavaScript iPhone UIs for Web Apps

Thinking about developing a web app for the iPhone? Or maybe an iPhone version of an existing website? Obviously you’re going to want it to look and “iPhoney,” having the slide animation when you go between screens, and things like that. It would be…

A Small Design Study of Big Blogs by Smashing Magazine

The supersized design blog Smashing Magazine has released an interesting and useful post analyzing the designs of the Technorati Top 50. They recorded statistics on the designs, and put together some percentages. Here are a few interesting numbers from the article: 92% have fixed…

47 Inspiring Web Designs

Over the past few months, I’ve put together a number of new designs, such as MVH Media. Though I normally have a rough idea of what I want a design to look like before I start, I end up skimming through online design galleries,…

Google and Yahoo to Index Flash (Unfortunately)

Earlier this month, Google and Yahoo announced that they will soon begin reading and indexing Flash files. This means that the search engines will be able to read through the content inside a full-Flash website (example) and commit the content to the index, where…

CSS and JavaScript: More Files or Less?

If you do much reading about web optimization, you will have heard people say that you should cram all your CSS into a single large file, and all the JavaScript into another, in order to save on loading times. 80% of the end-user response…

CNET Redesign Coming, Unfortunately

Last Monday CNET announced on their Outside the Lines blog that a redesign is underway. Normally I enjoy seeing new designs released, but not this time. I’m a big fan of CNET’s current design. It’s got a great look, and it’s inspired elements of…

10 Design Roundups You Shouldn’t Have Missed

It seems that a new post showcasing a collection of interesting web designs surfaces every week or so, sometimes more often. Here are a few older ones that 25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs Part 2 (also see parts 1 and 3) 32 Lightweight Designs…

Book Review: Designing the Obvious

I recently came a across a mention online of Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. Being a cheapskate as usual, I checked the local library’s catalog for the book, and checked it out the next time I went there. Designing the Obvious is…