Size Matters
Here’re some questions you’ll deliberate over for a while: how wide should my site be? Should it be fixed width or fluid width? If my site is x-pixels wide, how much of that real estate should a side nav (if any) occupy?
Overall width used to be a fairly cut and dry matter. It was based on screen resolution, and in particular the screen resolution of most Internet users.
At one point this was 800 x 600. These numbers refer to pixel size. And pixels are generally referred to first by width (800) and then by height (600). A pixel is about the size of the head of a pin.
What this meant was that sites were designed so that they were less than 800 pixels wide because sites wider than that wouldn’t "fit" on most users’ screens. Why the quotes? Because just as Web browsers let you scroll up and down, they also let you scroll left and right so "fit" is slightly ambiguous. Basically though, it you didn’t want a browser to throw a left/right scroll bar at the bottom of a page you stayed under the 800 pixel threshold.
That was all very long ago though. If 3, 4, 5 years ago seems like a long time. What happened? New computers, with new monitors that have better baseline resolution.
Now it’s almost a matter of what you want to do. The New York Times and the Washington Post are 970 pixels wide. CNN is 980 pixels wide.
These are all sites that cater to the "common" Internet user. By common I mean users with a typical computer, typical screen resolution, typical bandwidth connectivity. None of the above sites target discrete user classes so by definition they need to cater to all. And once you target everyone, decisions about such things as site width become increasingly important.
Here’s the World Wide Web Consortium’s statistics on screen resolution over the past few years.
This is all part of the 6-year recycle rule. This rule refers to the general amount of time a user has a computer before replacing it. What this means is that in 2000, site developers needed to create sites for people who may have bought their computer in 1994. This kind of blew because the difference between a 2000 computer and 1994 computer was pretty extreme.
Today, our baseline computer is generally from 2001. This is a good thing because computers from that time are pretty advanced.
What this means at a very basic level is that today you’re pretty much in control of what content you want to display and how you want to present it. Traditional constraints are fading away. That said, you still need to think about them and here are a variety of scenarios to consider when presenting content.
- What dimensions should my site have? What size/width. And how do I figure how much real estate to dedicate to navigation. (View)
- Text (articles) is one thing, but what if I’m presenting video or photography? Are there strategies for doing so? And how big should the image / video actually be? (View)
- Now that I’m displaying an image or video that takes up the entire page, how does the user navigate elsewhere? (View)
- Thumbnails can be your friend. They don’t show everything but people can extrapolate what they’re getting into. (View)
