Wide Load
May 10, 2006
When I was thinking about the layout of this site, I looked at numerous similar sites to see how wide they were. The majority of sites I’ve worked on have been a static width, usually centered, but sometimes anchored to the side, and have almost always been no wider than 770 pixels, which is usually a pretty safe bet for the majority of the population. I thought that that width seemed a little thin for what I had in mind with this site.
What I found through studying the layouts of my web mentors is that their sites are much, much wider. I designed this site at 900px wide. That’s three 300 pixel columns on the homepage, or a 300 pixel sidebar/600 pixel content area on the inside pages. Ahh…that’s better. Much more room. And that’s not even rivaling the widest of the wide. Here are some of the widths I found when I was researching (I think a few of these have changed in the meantime):
- Jon Hicks – 980 pixels
- Wishingline – 964 pixels
- Simplebits – 900 pixels
- Powazek – 840 pixels
- Rutledge – 820 pixels
Looking at my Mint stats, I think my decision to make the site this wide was OK, because 87% of visitors can most likely see everything without having to do any annoying horizontal scrolling. And I can see everything just fine on my 12" iBook.
There’s always that decision that needs to be made when doing a site layout – fixed or fluid, and they each have their own pitfalls. Of course there is always a cooler solution out there. The grass is greener over at Simplebits, where his layout employs “a centered, fluid-width layout with a conservative max-width applied“. With a toggle. Now that is some cool mojo. Mr. Cederholm, may I one day have half your powers.
May 11th, 2006
A very nice design. I especially like the little overlay you did with this right column. There’s one thing that I’m not sure about though. Most people have screens bigger then 900px, but if they don’t watch sites fullscreen (like most macusers), they can’t see the website very well. I think those people will miss a horizontal scrollbar when their browserwindow is too small.
Did you do that deliberately, or is this website not entirely finished yet?
Other then that, kudo’s :)
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May 11th, 2006
Thanks, Joram! The website is in progress (there’s a lot of things I still want to do, or NEED to do yet) but the layout is pretty well defined. I thought that if I wrote about web design related things here that my audience might be more inclined to have bigger monitors, or bigger viewing areas.
One thing I noticed while building was that I could still see everything on my little iBook, even if the window didn’t fill the whole screen, and I have the smallest iBook. So, I’m not too concerned about the width right now, but I may look into modifying it down the line to be fluid-width, similar to Simplebits.