Inside the Fold

I learned early on not to go food shopping on an empty stomach,

and to cut out the coupons before you make the list. Whenever I overlook these constraints my stomach outspends my wallet every time.

Well the same holds true for being a web designer. You have to get into a project knowing what you can deliver and then also have a few surprise coupons ready to make the project push the boundary a little.

If you have been at this for even a short time you learn quickly that there are a lot of constraints. For me it began primarily as typographic and it still is a biggie for a lot of us. After a few readings about Matthew Carter’s Verdana and Georgia I found an appreciation for what seemed like boring typefaces.

I soon found an appreciation for a decent array of browser capable fonts and controlled usage of image based text (sorry haven’t gotten into the SIFr technology stuff yet…) there were other constrains. These have no specific order: user monitor size, Flash Player, IE6, IE7, IE 5.5, CSS support, connection speed & load time, file size and png support to name a few. Thankfully I see the glass half full.

Hey we have all been there with an idea, enthusiasm and vision. Recently, I was working on a website for

the book, Porn for Women by Chronicle Books. You can look it over here.

There was a call for a Quiz users could take to see if there man was porn material or garbage. I am not super experienced making quizzes. Actually this was my first!

So I researched how to do this and came up with a few sources of information I thought to be credible. I started playing with the options and I had to work fast.

On the scale of priorities this was important in the long run since it was one of the seven navigation buttons/pages but for the initial launch it could be dealt with in numerous ways to get some content in place.

After an hour I had a working quiz comprised of 10 multiple choice questions and a loop that considered the results of the quiz to spit out evaluative statements based on the users score.

I figured I would take these conditional statements wrap em in a div and have unique id’s for each div so I could control how and where the output message displayed.