Thursday 17 May 2007

Monitor it . . .

Have you ever wondered whether your visitors see your pages exactly the same way you do? I don't mean the content, I mean the display. Are the subtle colours you've chosen for your site displaying exactly the same way on your visitors' screens? Is that carefully spaced caption or title displaying in exactly the same way in the other guy's display?

  1. They must, mustn't they?
  2. Never given it a thought!
  3. Is this a problem?
  4. Not bothered!

To answer the last observation first; you should be, or you're not putting enough effort into your blogging. Only you know what answer to give to the first two, but the answer to question 3 is an emphatic "Yes".

I have 5 monitors that I check to see how things are being displayed, especially when it comes to the 'size' of the display, but not one of them renders the colours exactly the same as the others. Close, but no cigar! No, this isn't degenerating into a play-ground bully mantra of, "My one is bigger than your one!" I was just trying to make a point that if I can't get 5 monitors to 'synch' to the same colour spectrum here under the same roof, what chance do you think you have of getting your colours to display the way you wish them to, across the internet? But you can do a lot to minimize the problem, and that is where a little 'tool' can come in handy (ouch! that is comparable to the play-ground bully comment above!).

Korax ColourDrop 4: A Color Picker with some subtle features. You can save your swatches too.

(Note: this is a direct link to the installation file. Since the file is an 'executable' I downloaded the file again and ran it through a virus checker and can declare it 'clean'. A habit you should adopt whenever you take stuff off the internet, whether or not you consider the source to be okay! It seems that Korax still hosts ColourDrop 4, but they don’t have a page dedicated to the application on their site).

If nothing else, it is a fun tool to use. You will never need to 'guess' a colour again, and you can even get the value of the colour of a single pixel, if that is your wish. In any case, download this little beauty and start to use it, and you might find you keep returning to it more and more frequently, even if it is only to satisfy yourself that your initial 'guess' was right!

By the way, it is FREE!

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2 comments:

oceansmiles said...

Your site is interesting and quite technical, but as I've complained about the colours on my blog for some time now, I'm going to give this a try~ thank you!

Fletch said...

Hi oceansmiles,

You're welcome to try just about anything I throw up here. My 'guarantee' is that if I put it up on this blog, and this template, it should work fine on yours.

Tip: When you have your page open (you have more than one blog so I don't know which one you intend to change), >>right click<< >>view source<< copy all and save as a text file. Now change the ".txt" extension of that file to ".html". You will now have a web page (your web page) saved to your local disk and you can change any of the colour combinations to your heart's content and 'display' it locally until you hit the right one(s)! None of this affects your original, so you can hack away as much as you like. Keep notes of what you change in case you decide to make the same changes to your site!

I think you've just instigated another 'tute'. I'll ponder this one. Thanks.