[WEB4LIB] New UW Law Library site design

[Thomas Dowling]

> The University of Wisconsin Law Library is proud to announce a new
> website design.  Check it
> out at http://library.law.wisc.edu/
>
> Comments are welcome.
>

It's a handsome design, but two things strike me right off the bat.

First, you write a lot of 700-pixel wide tables.  You may be thinking of
how the page looks on library workstations, where a web browser usually
runs by itself in a maximized window, and you may have a good sense of
what screen resolutions are in use there.  Elsewhere, a fixed 700-px
width could be a very wrong choice; I typically run browsers in windows
that are about 550- or 600px wide, and (like many users) I resent sites
that force me to resize my windows or scroll horizontally.  Perversely,
I sometimes rest my eyes by scaling my font size way up and running a
browser full screen, which for me is 1600-px wide, in which case your
whole home page is tucked away in the upper left corner of my browser
(this also illustrates that pictures of text, bound to specific pixel
dimensions, are an increasingly bad design choice).

[Believe me, a 1600x1200 screen is absolutely wonderful for reading text
in applications where you can scale fonts to taste--which is most of
them--but a real eye opener about a lot of pixel-based web designs that
assume an 800x600 or 640x480 world.]

Second, with all the onMouseover actions, the home page ends up sending
me over 200k of images.  No problem when I'm at work, but I'm not going
to sit through it at home.

CSS pedantry:  "font-family: Garamond;" should be "font-family:
Garamond, serif;" (or, even better, "font-family: AGaramond, Garamond,
serif;" if you want to please the Garamond lovers of the world).

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu