Equal height columns

One of the common issues that has plagued web designers is how to ensure that a sidebar column with a background colour will fill the height of the page when a second column is much longer. One of the most used options is Faux Columns by Dan Cederholm.

I’m going to show you how to quickly achieve identical height columns using jQuery.

We start with a simple layout:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

<div id="main">
  <div id="sidebar">
     Lorem ipsum..
  </div>

  <div id="content">
    Lorem ipsum...
  </div>
</div>

We can then use the following jQuery code to ensure that the sidebar is always equal to the height of the content column:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

var mainHeight = jQuery('#main').height();
  if (mainHeight > 280) {
    jQuery('#sidebar').css({
      height: mainHeight
    });
  } else { 
  };

This grabs the height of the #main div and if that height is greater than 280px, dynamically adjusts the height of the sidebar to match.

Want Beans Update

You no longer need to create an account to create a cafe on Want Beans. Add your favourite coffee house by visiting the new cafe page.

Empowerment

I was at a meeting a couple of days ago and somebody raised a question about empowerment for the employees. They seemed to be looking for an indication from our CFO that they would be empowered to, and entitled to, make decisions without having to refer it to a manager.

I found the question extremely strange as I have always considered the company for which I work to delegate a lot of responsibility to the employees. I have never felt constrained or not permitted to make a decision and thought it odd that a colleague did.

One of the things I do find is that people often shirk that responsibility. They ask for it. They want it. They want to feel that the company trusts them to do the right thing. But they don’t actually want to take action. They are too scared of making the wrong decision.

When recruiting people, I’m always interested in finding out how they respond to that kind of empowerment. I ask them for an example of when they took a wrong decision at work and how they coped with the consequences. Did it deter them from making further decisions?

Giving people the power to make decisions is half the battle. Creating a culture where people feel secure in actually making them is the other half. Where they don’t think they will get fired if it goes wrong. Where genuinely acting in the best interests of the company is the important thing.

Building Buzz

37signals, who are perhaps best known for Basecamp, have just posted an interesting blog post on how they built buzz in their early days. It’s a great look back at the origins of a company that now inspires a lot of other web design and web application companies. Not just in terms of the work they produce, but also in terms of their approach to running a business.

What the post highlights is how it is not always necessary to focus on what you do provided that the things you are doing are related to your primary activity. Ideas like the E-Commerce Search Report and Design Not Found offer an “in” to prospective customers.

I also subscribe to Seth Godin and one of the ideas he promotes is to always offer content. Seth has a new post on his blog every day (or thereabouts).

It takes a concerted effort to build buzz and drive business. The posts here at captured sparks have always been a little sparse, and mainly related to web development. From now, I will be making a concerted effort to post more.

Eventamatic!

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Eventamatic!, a simple way for you to manage your events.