Technical Decisions

Resolution

Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that most users are using a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels or higher, with a color depth of at least 65K. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp)

Just 0.6% of web-users today use a resolution less than 1024x768. Because of this, most designers build sites for this resolution and above. The decision to design for higher than this usually lies with the type of audience you'll be accommodating for.

Green & Black's audience is broad, consisting also of people who might not be using the latest hardware. This is why I shall ensure my design is optimised a a base resolution of 1024x760.

960-wide Grid

A lot of web-designers build their layouts using a popular 960-wide grid-system, like http://960.gs/. Although I shall be building my sites containment around 960 pixels wide (to leave enough space for the layout to breath when displayed at 1024x768), I shan't be using a framework, like the one above. I feel they're useful for prototyping but leave much to be desired when wanting to escape the grid.

Browser

The site will be designed to work in all major browsers. It shan't be supporting Internet Explorer 6, which is a mess when it comes to rendering compliant code. It also creates a security risk, which I believe outweighs most other points when a company who's involved in e-commerce is involved.

Major sites that have also revoked IE 6 support:

• All Google derivatives:
• - YouTube
• - Gmail, etc
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• ...

(YouTube notifying users before revoking IE 6 support)

UX (User-experience)

The User experience has dramatically improved over the past few years, resulting in rich and responsive user interface. AJAX, javascript and CSS are widely used to offer users the dynamic interaction that they have come to expect from advanced, sophisticated, professional solutions.

To enhance User-experience in my design, I will use jQuery - a popular JavaScript library. I shall use it to hide and show elements that don't need to be a part of the page indefinitely and also to inject the Twitter feed into a DIVide on the site. I shall use AJAX to do this and to further call on ten (at a time) more Twitter posts when the user has hit the bottom of the scrollable area. This will create an 'infinite' scroll - great for users who might want to read the entire story or for those who just want an update to it and don't want to have to wait for a mass of data to load.