Veerle's blog

When starting a web-page design a question that quickly comes to mind is, for which resolution will I create my design? I guess the answer depends most of all on your target audience. If you for example the design is for a website where you can hire online PC games then probably most visitors will have a rather big screen and a resolution of 1024x768 will be OK to start from.

But for an educational audience you should consider that the people who visit this site will be schools, students etc. and that most of them have a rather small screen. In this case you might still use 800x600.

Another question on your mind is, should the layout be stretchable? If you have doubts about which resolution should be best, then making your layout stretchable could sort this out. A stretchable layout has a lot of advantages. The most important one is of course that your content is shown in a very flexible way towards your visitors. Your visitor decides how big or wide he wants to view the page. The disadvantage is of course that not every design is really suitable to make it stretchable.

And most of the times you have to deal with some technical issues where you have to look for some smart solution to fix them. It needs some analyzing first before jumping right onto converting design to HTML. Another challenge is that it needs to look perfect in every width and that's not always obvious. Sometimes your text doesn't flow that nicely anymore around your picture as you would like it to be if the window is stretched out very wide.

An "in between" solution could be a fixed layout that flows in the center of the screen. This way you still have your fixed layout, which is "safe", it won't jump somewhere unexpectedly when you stretch your window. But of course this solution doesn't give the user more flexibility and freedom, your layout is still fixed and it only creates a nice balanced design. Personally I like these kind of designs, I don't mind the extra space on the left and right. It gives the page a certain tranquility. This can be suitable for pages that have a lot of text to read. It will be more inviting to read if you have some rest-points on the left and right instead of a page filled with text from left to right.

Also don't forget to use a rather bigger line height for the text and make sure to divide it into small paragraphs to make it even more inviting and to avoid an overloaded page. I personally never use the entire width of my Cinema Display when surfing the web, in fact I hate it when sites force full screen. Isn't it better to scroll a bit in a nice looking website where you have control on how things look instead of letting the user decide to stretch the lay-out and mess it all up? If this is the case all your design efforts are lost.

3 important criteria:

• ask yourself who are my visitors?
• is a fixed layout the only solution? can I make it stretchable?
• make sure to have enough rest-points, avoid overload

Some handy JavaScript to paste into the URL field to automatically resize your browser window so you can test how it looks when designing:

• javascript:window.resizeTo(640, 480);
• javascript:window.resizeTo(800, 600);
• javascript:window.resizeTo(1024, 768);

It looks like the in between solution is the most common one used, certainly for blogs. I guess it's just not an easy task to satisfy everyone. There will always be visitors who complain about the fact that they can't stretch the content. but in most circumstances these are people who don't give a damn about looks. Any other insights?