28 Jun 2006

Site Launch > LudemaBoyinkSod.com

Ludema & Boyink Sod Farm is located 1/2 hour east of Grand Rapids, MI in Clarksville, MI and provides residential and commerical sod sales and delivery to all of West Michigan. You can also pick it up yourself at our farm.
http://www.LudemaBoyinkSod.com/

I’m pleased to announce the launch of http://www.LudemaBoyinkSod.com Yes, this is nepotism at work as the “Boyink” portion of that domain does represent another family member, in this case my uncle and cousins who own and operate the sod farm.

The site is their first one on the web, and was done with a focus on providing basic business, product, and contact information for potential customers.

From an implementation perspective the focus was on developing a site with a low cost of entry, so rather than implement at content management system the small site is hand-coded and static.  For a design we “mashed up” a couple of pre-existing templates available on the internet.  I will admit - this is one time where I knew immediately what background image the site would have and the rest of the design was figured out after that...wink

The icons are from http://www.famfamfam.com, and hosting is provided by pMachineHosting.

Please welcome another Boyink to the web!

Comments

1

June 28, 2006

Mike & Others,

I noticed that the width of the sod site is FIXED, which allows for excellent pixel-fitting of images into the content/headings.  The problem is that many browser windows / screen resolutions accomodate quite a bit wider viewing widths.

How do you or others create images that will allow a site to be dynamic (CSS widths in percentages) but will not look “dreadful” when the site is stretched wider than (say for instance the sod-farm site) 800x600, but still want to use images throughout?

Any thoughts on this?!?  Many of Mike’s creations (and others) are fixed, but I really want to utilize the new screens web visitors are using!?!

2
(Author)
June 28, 2006

Hi Kevin -thanks for the heads up on the link.

Fixed vs. “liquid” design is a complex issue.  One is for the reason you mention - if you use images in a large way you can’t get them to stretch along with the rest of the site.

One other issue is line length - usability research indicates that line lengths over a certain amount actually cause people to read slower and remember less of what they read (there’s a reason newspaper columns are the length they are).

There’s also cross-browser issues, and if they all render percentages the same...and then what do you do for monitors that are crazy-wide?

And honestly - fixed width designs (for me anyway) are just easier (fewer variables), so less time-intensive, so cheaper for clients.

Having said that, designs that take advantage of extra screen real estate by showing another column, etc are getting more common - see :

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/mission

(play around with resizing your browser and refreshing the page).

There’s also http://www.cssliquid.com/

Just FYI - one of the projects I just started on will be a full-width design.

3

July 06, 2006

Boyink Interactive did a fanastic job creating our website.  Our site is easy-to-navigate with a very professional look.  Mike Boyink created our site with very little direction from our company; he took the time to understand our business in order to know what information would be important on our website.  Our website is better than we ever imagined!

Laura Moore
Offfice Manager
LUDEMA & BOYINK SOD FARM
800-696-7745

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