It was a long time ago that I last redesigned my website. I think at that point, 800×600 was still a fairly common screen resolution and I had also been experimenting with accessing my site on my Palm Pilot. I decided to ditch side columns and allow the content to stretch all the way across.

This liquid layout worked with smaller browsing windows but resulted in uncomfortably long lines at what became more common settings. From a visual point of view, it also made it impossible to judge what a paragraph of text would look like – a page filling monster or a measly line or two.

Last night I finally got round to tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that creates the visual appearance of the site. I have opted for a single, relatively narrow, 560px wide column for the main content block, although the top and bottom of the page are still allowed to stretch. Along with a larger font, I think the result is more aesthetically pleasing although a little bit more browser testing is still due.

I might make a few more tweaks before I am done but I think this has been a worthwhile step forward. What do you think?

Technorati Tags:

web design

layout

css