Servage Magazine

It’s not easy to create a great web service and have maintain a nice looking design as well, unless you’re one of the gifted few, that can do it all – or have a whole team working on your project. Nevertheless, this article about 34 great admin panels designs shows a few really nice templates that you can use in their entirety or as inspiration for the creation of your own design.

Design discussions are always subject to personal preferences, but there are some methodological questions as well, as to what type of layout people prefer. Some of the presented designs are fixed, while some are liquid designs. Personally, when using templates, I prefer liquid designs, because even if you don’t want it to be 100% fluent, you can always constrain it within a box (i.e. div-container) that you give a specific width. Fixed-width layouts on the other hand are much harder to change in that respect. Actually, this is a tip valid for any kind of development: If possible, make it liquid, so sub-elements follow the width-restriction of the container. That way you can always change your mind regarding the layout, and you just have to change one width-parameter, and the rest just plays along nicely.

For designing your own layout I recommend having a look at the YUI Grids.