Something Interactive

If you’re a multi-window user (windows not maximized to full screen) or have a computer with a lower resolution and navigate to anybody’s Twitter page, you may have problems viewing their background image because of the twitter page framework that overlays on the page.

I came across a couple blogs that solely advertised their services of creating eye-catching, advertising backgrounds for anyone’s Twitter page.

This my friends, is a HUGE rip-off – and here’s why:

1. Twitter’s backgrounds are left aligned, yet their content framework is center aligned. This will always block the background at inconvenient proportions.
2. If you try to display information like phone numbers, email addresses, or website addresses in the background picture (as a result of point 1) will be cut off or impossibly unreadable due to the maximum amount of space available between the left side of the page and the left side of the content framework.
3. People who are savvy enough to use Twitter, don’t even use the Twitter website, in favour of social media aggregator/updater apps. They sanitize the content to just the Tweets alone, so the backgrounds aren’t even seen.

I don’t have statistics on how many people use Twitter, what their resolutions or screen sizes are, or what apps they use to aggregate Twitter with, but not once have I ever been impressed with someone’s twitter background that has advertising material to promote themselves. Phone numbers, email or website addresses are constantly cut off, and even photos of the Twitter profile user are cut off or whatever they are trying to sell is cut off or blocked by the Twitter content framework.

Twitter needs to add a little more customization to their user profile stylesheet management first before I would ever consider using the background of my Twitter page as another avenue to advertise myself.
Instead, for my Twitter profile, I have ingeniously used one of my artwork pieces and created a simple pattern out of it; there isn’t any important information being cut off, and aesthetic quality of the background image adds a truly unique expression of creativity.

And those other people who are charging money to create custom Twitter backgrounds, I tip my hat off to you; you’re making money from being scrupulous thieves and selling graphics that don’t do their job very well.

The following screen shots were taken at the very popular 1024×768 resolution.

When you find yourself coding a website for multiple browsers and get all caught up with going to the extremes of using browser hacks just to try and meet your personal visual standards verses the W3C compliant standards, you find yourself at a crossroad where both standards are at jeopardy.

What do you do? Which standard should you favour?

You’ve got to make a decision on what is most important, and while you may not like the result, you can justify it with this simple reasoning I read in a blog comment from Brad Czerniak that perfectly sums up how you should approach the solution:

I personally don’t find it necessary for everything to look exactly the same in all browsers, and this is a good example of a place where a minor difference makes a modern browser look good and a legacy browser still function properly.

Take the extremes of web design/development: you want to make the content still accessible on the worst of browsers (ie LYNX), yet display the content as beautifully as possible if they have the best and latest browser versions (ie Firefox 3).

What are the tools/browsers of your ideal audience?
When and how do you show your antiquated audience that they’re missing out?
When and how do you reward your savvy audience?

Lastly, where will you draw the line?