Clients, friends, family, randomers who stop by from Google – Happy Christmas to everyone!

Hope you have a wonderful holiday, and regardless of what the media are banging on about, I have a really good feeling in my bones for 2009.

I think it’s going to be a good one.

An exciting one. A more interesting one than 2008 perhaps, maybe it’ll have an edge to it, and if it does we’ll use it to our advantage!

See some of you for coffee in the New Year again, and hopefully see some more of you for coffee for the first time!

Happy Christmas from me, Frank Prendergast, at WebsiteDesignCork.com.

Cartoon illustrated by me, written by Brendan O’Connell. See BifSniff.com for more.

There are very few content or structure changes, this was largely a change of the look and feel, although I did add a few internal links in the footer which use some terms I’m competing for as the anchor text, so I’ll be curious as to whether there is any noticable change in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

Google has been toying with where to position me again, and I have been bouncing around between position 4 and 15 for the term ‘web design cork’.

While I expect to end up somewhere between the two at the moment, I see it as a good sign – I reckon a couple of quality links are what I need to convince Google I should be on that first page permanently!

I’ll be donning my thinking cap re quality links over the next couple of weeks to see what I can come up with

Oh, I also added a Stuff I Love page with a regularly changing ‘recent’ section as well as more permanent list of friends and acquaintances I admire.

If you’re based in Cork and are involved in techie type stuff, leave a comment below, especially if you think I might not be aware of you – I’m trying to build myself a better picture of what’s happening in Cork

Hope you like the new look…

That question is too large a question for one blog post, so let’s pair it back to one key question – how wide should you design your site? Here is my answer and how I came to decide on this approach.

Fluid vs. Fixed
The first debate when it comes to presentation of your website is fluid vs fixed width design. Fluid design is one that scales no matter what size your browser is, and fixed width remaines the same width whether you visit with a tiny screen or a massive screen.

Fluid designs tend to be more accessible and have obvious advantages when it comes to being suitable for varying screen sizes, but fluid websites by their nature have to relinquish a lot of design control.

In 2006 Jakob Nielsen recommended fluid (or liquid) layouts, but the reality is that people wanted more control over the appearance of their sites, and while certain sites, like Governmental sites, whose sole purpose is to present information to the public are perfect candidates for fluid layout, most businesses require more control over their design and therefore fixed layouts are much more popular and common.

With a fixed width design you have much more control over how the site will look on all devices and screen resolutions, but you have to play the numbers game because a site designed for small resolutions will look dwarfed at higher resolution screens and a site designed for higher resolutions won’t be entirely visible on smaller screens.

Most Common Resolutions
As you can see from the following table of data from w3Schools.com, 800×600 resolutions are dying out (down to 8% Jan 2008) and 1024×765 and higher acccounts for 86%. This data is from w3schools own log files but it does tally with what I see in log files for sites I maintain, and most other studies I have seen.

Resolution is not browser window size
So now we have an idea of up to date resolutions, but the reality is a little different because people may not browse with their browser window maximised, or they may have various toolbars on the browser installed, or they may browse with things like ‘favourites’ opened, all of which reduce the actual size left for us to design within.

This leads me to two related articles:
Actual Browser Sizes – a study to discover the actual widths and heights of visitors browsers. he took took three months of data gathered from 5 different sites. Until someone like Google begins to gather this information using analytics or something similar this is the best data I have found on the subject.

The study concludes:

if you want to design for 95% of your visitors you need design for no more than 776×424px (fixed layout)

The second site is based on this study:
Size does matter – Actual numbers
And this article concludes:

if you optimize your design for a width of 770 pixels, you’ll be optimizing for 97% of the visitors.

Are the articles still relevant?
Both articles were written in 2006, however the resolution trends we saw above mean that these articles are still relevant, and to further back up these articles I installed FoldSpy on my site to get access to the data it had collected.

FoldSpy gives data on browser viewport sizes from 77,697,453 browser screens measured on 2,782 sites since July 2007. FoldSpy is not exact in explaining how it collects the data, or the nature of sites it collects data from, but as it broadly backs up the findings from the other articles, I think the figures are good guides (I did email FoldSpy to ask them for more details, but I haven’t heard back yet).

FoldSpy tells me that a site designed at 770×400 fixed width will be optimised for 93% of visitors.

My conclusions
I personally design quite a few sites at 770 pixels fixed width which work well and can use design elements to create the illusion of a wider site, but there is a trend toward designing wider sites which can’t be ignored.

If I am working on a site which I feel, or the client feels, needs a wider design I try to ensure that the essential content is contained within 770 pixels in the first columns, with a third or more columns to create width without losing effectiveness to visitors with smaller viewports.

If you have a different view, or some stats to back up or contrast with what’s in this post, please leave a comment!

Google have one, it’s a G in a box. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go to google.com and look for the little G where you type the address.

Favicons are not hard to create, and add a nice finishing touch to a website. I found a great article on favicons which also links to PixelToolbox - the FREE tool I use myself to create favicons.

PixelToolbox allows you to easily create 16px x 16px windows icons and save them as favicons. While you don’t have to use this format, it is the most widely adoped format so your favicon will be picked up by the maximum amount of browsers and will look great in all of them.

Create your icon, save as favicon.ico and upload it to the root directory of your website. Et voila.

It’s only a little thing, but it adds another small layer of professionalism to your site.

1. Keywords
For the purposes of this project I decided to base my domain name around the keywords I would be targetting, thus WebsiteDesignCork.com.

Another approach would have been to find a short, catchy and memorable domain name, but because of the nature of my site I felt it important that it serve as a working case study as well as my business site, and therefore I decided to go with a keyword based domain name.

I discovered, through some keyword research, that ‘web design’ would be a better search term to target than ‘website design’ (more people search for ‘web design’) but since WebDesignCork.com was already taken I decided to settle for WebsiteDesignCork.com.

2. Hyphenation
I also decided to register a non hyphenated name. When it comes to domains which include keywords there is a school of thought which believes a delimiter to isolate keywords helps search engines to more easily identify them. For example website-design-cork.com

However, if you are choosing a hyphenated domain, keep hyphens to a minimum. Domains with too many delimiters can appear quite spammy, and you may find your domain being too similar in appearance to the likes of buy-cheap-viagra-here-now-and-get-a-free-e-book.com. Hyphenated domains can also be awkward to pass on by word of mouth.

A good option would have been to register the hyphenated and non hyphenated version, using the hyphenated as the primary domain and use domain pointing to allow word of mouth.

However, website-design-cork.com was also taken, and so I settled for the non hyphenated version.

3. TLD and region specific searches.
I also considered which TLD (Top Level Domain) to register with, and the best options were .com or .ie.

If I had registered with .ie, I would be likely to get an extra boost on country specific searches – for example when people select the ‘pages from Ireland’ option in Google.

In the end I settled on .com as it is a strong domain, and usually the first TLD people try when attempting to enter your domain from memory.

4. How long to register for.
I decided to register the domain for 10 years, as this too can help with search engine results – for example Google have the ability to check your domain details and it is believed that you may be taken more seriously if you show you are here for the long haul.

5. Word of mouth.
As I’ve already mentioned, in most cases it is important to consider how easy it will be to tell people about your site. Try to keep your domain short, easy to spell and easy to remember..

My site is a little on the long side, however because it is highly descriptive and contains keywords I decided the trade off was worth it.

I will begin populating the blog over the next few days with some tips and observations which arose out of the development of this site, so that this site itself will become a case study for my own work.

I would expect, in time, to be seeing visitors finding this site when looking in the search engines for people or firms who can provide them with web design services, whether it be designing sites form the fround up, or specific tasks such as search engine optimisation.

I am soft launching this site now, but you may notice that at the time of launch there is no portfolio section. This is because I have recently decided to go freelance, and while I have a huge amount of experience in web design and development, I felt the portfolio section on this site should only contain items which have been developed since the decision to go freelance.

Bear with me while the site develops, and thanks for dropping by.