Website design...a small rant.

[temporus]

Okay, this is an unasked for rant.  And clearly, it's just my personal opinion on the matter.   But I figure, I should say something, because it's annoying the heck out of me, and well, if I don't say something that just makes me an jerk.   Okay, I'm probably a jerk whether I say something or not, but at least this way, if I say something, then people can ignore it by choice, instead of never having been informed.

What the heck am I babbling about?   Archaic design.

I'm seeing more, and more, and more websites that seem to be designed for ease of use on older screen resolutions.  Now, I don't have a problem with wanting to keep your website accessible to as large an audience possible.  (Though I'll note that few enough people take the time to support Lynx users or make sure their sites work okay for the visually impaired, but that could be a separate rant.)   What I object to is designing it for the older screen resolutions, in such a way that makes the newer screen resolutions practically irrelevant.   I use a wide-screen monitor.   I don't enjoy reading text limited to only one half or less of my screen in a tiny narrow strip, and having to scroll ad infinitum in order to read a page.   I'm scrolling three times as much as I should need to, because people are forcing me to view their page as if I were on a smaller resolution.   Now, I understand, you shouldn't be trying to design your website specifically for my resolution, which is admittedly, very, very large.  (1920x1200)  But the design that supports lower resolution shouldn't limit me to that lower resolution.

Now, I'm not a world class web designer.  I can write html, but you start getting too fancy and you start to lose me fast.  I'm not saying whole design stinks, because that's not the case.   I'll give one specific example, though it is by no means a singular example out there in the field.  (In this case, I'm talking about Author Websites, because it's what I'm thinking about for myself.)   Jeff VanderMeer just came out with a new website Ecstatic Days.  Now, I like the look and feel of the site a lot.*  I think it is generally well done.  Except for the part where on my screen, the blue side bars take up a full 3 1/4 " of space, each side.   That means for me, I have 6 1/2"  of my 13" wide screen has a pretty blue background, but nothing useful.  That's half my screen width.   If I dropped my resolution to 1024x768 it fits perfect.  But I'll never use that resolution, because its designed around a 4:3 aspect ratio, and my monitor uses 16:9.   More, and more we're seeing the 16:9 screens out there, as High-Def starts to take over.  

If you have a site, or are updating a site, or are thinking about creating a site: keep it in mind.  Resolutions are a changing.  Screen formats are a changing.   I'm not saying don't support the older screen sizes or resolutions.   I'm just saying, don't lock yourself into one, because you shouldn't need to.


*I mean it, I like the website a lot, and wish I could do something a quarter as good.  I only used it as an example, because it's one that sticks out as a website that I think is good and yet still exhibits the behavior that's bothering me.  I didn't want to pick a website that was a stinker all around, because that might confuse the issue.

Comments

[l-clausewitz.livejournal.com]

Ouch. But then, it's not all that easy to make a good design without fixing a preferred resolution for it...

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I'll grant that trying to make a design that's perfect for all resolutions cuts down on creativity. A lot. I don't think it's impossible though.

I just hate having *that much* wasted space on my screen. I was particularlly annoyed when I was playing around with Google pages, making a mock up of what I would like my homepage to be, and it forced me to a template that used even *less* space on the screen than that.

[blue-23.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is the tools and the way web designers do things. I have a guy on my team who went to a design school for web page design. (He's now doing database web tool development, long story).

When I use my (meager) html skills, I put in a lot of things with percentages - which will adjust to your screen. But if your screen is small, you end up problems. He does everything in CSS and fixed widths. Looks nice, but is wasteful on the higher resolutions.

We've talked about it, and he has his reasons to use fixed widths, and I have my reasons, and we end up agreeing to disagree.

So I think it's how they're taught.

*shrug*

Cheers,
=Blue(23)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised. And, I fully acknowledge that by setting up your design parameters so that they are more universal definitely cuts down on the available options. I just get more and more tired of scrolling through pages, that I shouldn't need to scroll through. Actually, the worst offender of this is: Blogger. Blogger blogs take up less than half my screen width. Almost consistently. Drives me nuts. I prefer to setup blog feeds for myself, and read them on my friends page for that reason, so I don't have to deal with that frustratingly tiny landing strip of text on my screen.

Bleh.

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

Actually archiac design is not using java or flash or one of the other tools to accomodate other browsers, instead of making seperate version that is viewable for them.

You have a valid rant.. although it is rather difficult to make a good looking design that functions for all resolutions. For dealing with your situation, it is the reason my side bar menus are still popular, because you can use a percentage for the rest of the page, and the menu will still look fine.

[goblindegook.livejournal.com]

Hey there. First of all, thanks for the praise, I'm glad you liked the site, your opinions on the fixed layout notwithstanding. :)

I don't usually go around answering to people's criticism, but I'm here and I'm bored so I might as well explain myself: the fixed layout was a deliberate design choice for the sake of usability. I have an academic background in HMI design and I still have trouble keeping Jakob Nielsen from getting in the way of my creativity --- if you know Nielsen, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Now, we did toy with the idea of an elastic layout, but we didn't want to have to deal with people complaining about lines that were much too long to read, or greasy screens from their running their index fingers to keep up with the text. Since Jeff's site will feature long posts, and even some fiction and essays, it goes without saying that readability is a huge concern. I chose a static layout for the exact same reason newspapers contain text arranged in columns, except that columns would be impractical on a website or simply too damned hard to do do properly. So if you're creating a site, keep that in mind as well, and let the two requirements battle it out for a while.

I may yet do an elastic layout switcher and let the user decide, but that will involve some JavaScript and CSS wrangling, which I'm afraid isn't a priority right now. I will keep that in mind though.

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time to explain your side of the issue. I'm willing to concede, that I probably live on a screen resolution well beyond the average consumer. However, I think that we will be finding more and more wide-screen users on the internet, and even those unwilling to push their eyesight quite as far as I do will begin to notice these trends.

You do present a fair answer. It doesn't help prevent my frustration, because it still feels as if most of the web is stuck in these older resolutions. Some sites, like Blogger, and now apparently Googlepages, seem intent to force design into that same path, though they are by far the worse, since they take up even less of my screen, and are even more uncomfortable/annoying to read.

As a side note, the site works well on my Blackberry. (Except for the top graphic, but I think that's due to being white, meant to be over the blue background, and Blackberry insists on putting it on a white background. But that's the way the BB Browser seems to behave.)