Alex Hardy

I just spent about an hour going through and binning correspondence. I admit, if I bothered to keep on top of it the job wouldn’t have seemed so bad. I thought to myself how wasteful this whole process is, as I ripped up statement after notice after special offer. Wasteful of my time and of an appalling amount of paper. So I’ve decided to get on top of things:

• Gas, electricity and water
• Council tax
• TV license
• Current account and savings account
• Credit card statements
• Cable TV, broadband and land-line
• Mobile phone

I want paper free everything.

Halifax Online leaves much to be desired, but does provide online statements that I’ve previously saved as PDFs. Really, that’s a little shabby of me because I could download Quicken documents that I could import into an app like Money.

I’ll start by doing that. I’ll report how many of these services I’m able to tidy up on.

Brent’s post on site stats vs. generally accepted “truth” got me thinking.

With any project you have to begin somewhere, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable in 2007 to design a site like Refresh for 1024×768+. The minority who are still using screens at 800×600 will just have to scroll a little bit – something I’m sure they’re quite used to doing.

That’s my judgment call, and on my head be it. But what about down the line? What if a year into the site’s life my stats tell me another story? I usually design webpages from a Photoshop template that I created some time ago. It shows the available space at 800×600 without scrolling (which I have determined to be 760×420), and at 1024×768 (960×590). I think it’s time to update that template.

I looked at my Mint stats, specifically the Real Estate pepper, which lists a breakdown of the window widths visitors are using. Now, the stats for my site are immature (because the site is so new), but this post is about the exercise…

I expanded the document size to cover a screen resolution of 1600×1200, added my space markers as before, then blacked out the background. I drew in blocks of white (punching out the smaller blocks from each layer) which indicate the listed dimensions in Real Estate. I then set their opacity to reflect the usage.

What comes out is a rather interesting little snapshot of the actual use of my site, compared against the spaces I might choose to work into.

Download a GIF version (50k) or the layered Photoshop file (120K ZIP).

I think it would be illuminating to do this exercise every three months, and use it to inform redesigns of a website. I’m also tempted to make a Flash version that displays live stats from a Mint database.