Introduction

Over a period of about 15 years we gained an enormous amount of experience in website development and I learned that it was important to stop and think about what size screen resolution should we be building websites at?

I was reading somewhere recently that apparently these days the only answer to that question should be ‘all of them’ and ‘none of them’. What this basically means is that new websites should be built to accommodate all different screen sizes these days, particularly with the increased popularity of hand help web browsers, smart phones, net books and the like. Of course there is also the other end of the spectrum in the new huge wide screen flat screen monitors. I recently treated myself to a 24 inch Asus which does 1920×1080 which is big enough to get two web browser windows on screen side by side, but if you make one of them full size, the majority or websites look, well, just plain odd!

What exactly is screen resolution then?

If you are not familiar with screen resolution, the simple answer is that it is the size of your display. However, this can be quite misleading because it is actually the number of pixels that make up the display area on the screen of your monitor. Still not clear? Well let’s look at some examples to help clarify exactly what screen resolution is.

Currently what would appear to be the most common screen resolution is 1024×768 (accounting for 62% of my website visitors). This is a screen that is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. What is a pixel? A Pixel, derived from the phrase Picture Element, is basically one of the thousands of tiny dots that make up your display screen. However, this does not necessarily determine the physical size of your monitor (14 inch, 15 inch, 19 inch etc) because most monitors are capable of displaying the screen in different screen resolutions. It is fairly true to say that if you want to run your monitor at a high screen resolution then you will need a large monitor, the larger the monitor the greater the resolution it can display at (assuming your graphics card can support a high resolution).

All getting a bit technical? Put simply the higher the screen resolution the more things you can fit on your screen before they have to go onto the next line, or before you have to scroll down or scroll right.

What’s this got to do with Website Design?

When creating the layouts for a new website design, traditionally the experienced graphic designer would be working to a specific resolution in order to make sure that the design fits in your browser window without having to scroll right. (Thankfully most website owners don’t demand you make their pages so that you don’t have to scroll down anymore!)

I know of a Nottingham web design agency who now design specifically for scalability and fluidity in their designs so as to enable the site to fit a full screen, irrespective of its size.

When designing at a fixed resolution you can deal with larger display settings by either aligning the site to the left and having a huge great big gap to the right, or you can centre align the website in the available space and then the extra screen resolution will be on either side of the content area.

However, the sensible, modern day approach is to make the site flexible to allow for all screen resolutions by creating ‘fluid’ content that will flow to fit the available page space irrespective of what size screen resolution it is viewed at.

Also, because of the increased popularity of the web the challenge for a website owner is how to engage your viewers and get them to stay on your website for as long as possible and show them as much content as possible. One way to help with this is to make full use of all of the available space. Two great big blank areas either side of a tiny web page is simply just a waste of space. Imagine if you picked up a newspaper or magazine and only half of the front page had got any content on it, the editor would get the sack for sure! So by creating fluid content, web site owners can take advantage of larger publishing spaces available on bigger screen users, whilst optimising content for display on smaller screens too.

Another advantage with big screen displays is the ability to use the new area for re-publishing. Re-publishing is a way to put content from another area of your website onto a different page, thereby bringing it forward for the viewer. An example of this that we did on one site we created was to insert an alphabetical list of names of the products available on the website underneath the left hand menu on pages that were very long.

All pages tend to be different lengths, as determined by the content on the page, so we used a clever widget to create this list of product names and squirt it in the gap until it ran out of space. This was great for SEO too as it gave a direct link to specific product pages based on their product names without having to crawl through category pages first, also website users would often see something in the list they wanted and click straight through to the page and buy the item.

Ultimately this has evolved into what would now be thought of as a web 2.0 ‘tag cloud’ a list of tags that are usually user generated, to indicate and link directly to a specific content group or item. Using a tag cloud is a great way to fill flexible spaces on larger screens that you can fill with what are effectively links to other parts of the website.

How do you create fluid content?

Fluid content is not that hard to create, the majority will be words of course, which are naturally fluid so on a small resolution screen you might get 5-10 words to a row, on a larger screen you can get 20-30 words or more. However the challenge comes with images, and particularly website graphics. A photograph, whilst it can be made smaller and larger offline, it can’t be automatically resized by the web browser at the time of viewing (not taking into account the Zoom function in Internet Explorer).

The HTML code that makes up your web pages is again designed to allow fluidity by fitting content into the available page area, so some pointers that can be employed to make content fluid include not using tables in the code (which are depreciated these days now anyway), not setting specific screen width in pixels, use 100% instead. By fading images into blocks of colour in the website graphics, you can create a stretchable element that will scale to fit all window sizes. Use little boxes to put stuff in, these can then flow around the screen as required without having to be in any particular place, they also help to draw the eye to special offers, discounts, newsletter sign ups etc, and can of course be styled by your graphic designer with colours and shadows and gradients to look great.

Conclusion

The finest Loughborough web design companies provide web designs that work on all screen resolutions because they are fluid and scalable in design, from the smallest mobile phone browser right up to the huge 27 inch flat screen displays running massive screen resolutions. This technology is available now, if you select the right agency to do it for you, so why exclude potential customers from viewing your website properly just because they are not using a standard setup. In the current economic climate do you really want to be excluding any potential customers?

 

I am often asked, “how long does it take to learn Spanish?” I’m afraid this is largely a million dollar question and one for which there is no simple answer.

Sadly there are simply way too many variables concerned, in that so much depends on how much effort a person is prepared to put into learning the language, and also which technique or program they’ll be using. Add to that the incontrovertible fact that while some individuals may choose to use the services of a personal tutor, others will choose a classroom environment instead. In reality, some people will rather opt for using one or other home study program which gets use from books, multimedia, software, and audio recordings. You also need to ask whether the student will be learning the language in a land where it’s spoken as the local language, or whether they will be learning it in their home country. Additionally, the standard of a program or the experience of a teacher will also influence the outcome.

Since these variables will have such a direct impact on how long does it take to learn Spanish, it is just not possible to provide a simple response to this question. In reality, I have personally met individuals who after half a year, managed to communicate confidently in conversational Spanish, but also , I’ve met people who have attempted to study the Spanish language for a few years, albeit on an on and off basis, and yet after many years they can hardly get by.

Instead of attempt to supply a simple response to this question, I’d prefer to offer what I feel to be the quickest way of learning Spanish. The most significant step of all, is for a person to seize each available opportunity with regards to interacting in the language they would like to learn, irrespective of what language that could be.

While you actually do get people who are firm followers of the school room approach, I feel it takes too long unless it is done with another method. In my opinion, a self study method of high quality is by a large margin superior in that it allows a student to move forward at their own pace instead of being tied down to the average classroom pace. This is particularly true with regards to students who are really serious about learning a language.

In this situation, I might suggest a person to select a reputable program which includes a selection of audio lessons, multimedia lessons, and naturally, written Spanish. In addition, they should select a program which allows for lessons to be downloaded onto a mobile device so that the student can listen on their iPod for instance. Remember, if you’re serious about learning a language, then you should aim at having the ability to not only speak it and read it, but also to write it and understand it. Unless a program covers all 4 of these areas, it needs to be avoided or at least, you will require some further material.

As you’ll have already heard, Rocket Spanish is an extremely popular program, and not without reason. Considering that it addresses all four of the area’s mentioned, it has gained a reputation for providing students with a first foundation for basic Spanish which in turn will ensure that you are able to speak confidently in Spanish within a relatively short space of time. Similarly, Rosetta Stone is considered to be nearly as good, in that it also addresses the four areas discussed above. Furthermore, it is available in two versions so that individuals can choose between the “Spain” version and the Latin American Spanish version. Judging by testimonials, it seems the Rosetta Stone program takes a touch longer to work thru, which of course means it’ll take you a little longer before you develop conversational Spanish but in general, it ranks right up there with Rocket Spanish. Also, Rosetta Stone is significantly costlier.

As you can see, there are too many variables concerned for me or anyone else to be in a position to give a single response with regards to “how long does it takes to learn Spanish. However, you have probably also gathered by now that there are a few things you can do in order to hurry up the method. In reality, many individuals go as far as using both the programs mentioned in conjunction with each other to develop conversational abilities as quickly as possible. However, unless you are steadily exposed to the Spanish language, no program will be capable of making you 100 % fluent. On the other hand, providing you’re at an intermediate-to-advanced level, you might consider subscribing to Puerta del Sol Audio magazine which is a Spanish language abilities Magazine. Furthermore, you’d be surprised at how much you can benefit from joining a Meetup group in your neighborhood that focuses on learning the Spanish language.