How Wide is Too Wide?
Posted On: 2009-07-13
Well that weekend passed in a blur of running around doing everything but what we really wanted to do and the coming week is going to be an absolute pain too ... but that's life. Even when your business is doing well there are going to be times when life matters just get in the way and then it's time to do what I said last week ... just go with the flow ... and keep your head above water until things settle down once more.
If you're new to this industry then there are going to be plenty of times when it pays to go with the flow and wait for things to calm down a bit.
Webpage width
We were talking with a mainstream client last week about just how wide to make his new website. He wanted his site to be seen by the most number of people without the need to scroll to the right because he understand just how annoying that need to scroll can be. While Steve and the client talked about screen sizes I started thinking about the actual code I would write for the site.
I know that I could use my new CSS skills to build a site that had its width set to 100 per cent and then I wouldn't have to worry about the width at all ... or would I? Yes, I know that many designers do go down that 100 per cent width path and it did work for them in the past but not so much anymore.
It was only a couple of years ago that the screen size on everyone's monitor was a nice and easy to work with 800x600 or 1028x768. Those are easy resolutions because the difference in size isn't huge and the stretching the content to fill a slightly wider screen didn't cause many problems. But these days all those common resolutions are slowly disappearing as more and more wide-screen monitors come onto the market.
There are eight different screen sizes just in the Notebook market so if you build a site with a width set to 100 per cent you're really entrusting your site to a totally unknown quantity and what might have looked very neat on your 1028x768 monitor can look terrible at 1440x900 and even worse at some of the other resolutions for that are now pre-set on 24 and 26 inch wide screen monitors.
What was once a neat and compact site can now include large gobs of white space and text that stretches across the screen in long lines that become hard to follow. This is a major problem when you're trying to take a surfer and lead him through a web page to a particular link that you want him to click. That neat path for the surfer to follow that you built using your 19 inch monitor simply disappears on a larger monitor.
So, whether you like it or not ... and there are plenty of web designers out there who definitely don't like it ... you're going to have to design your sites to a fixed width if you really want to control how your site is going to look.
Of course some of you ... especially if you've already done some online work over in mainstream are going complain about building sites that aren't aesthetically pleasing and you would have a point if making money in adult was all about building great looking sites. Unfortunately making money in adult is more about building sites that actually encourage the surfer to buy what you're selling rather than impressing him with your web design abilities.
So drop the idea that the sites and galleries you build have to be works of art ... they don't ... and they shouldn't be. Instead all they need to be are vehicles to get your marketing message in front of the eyes of people who may want to buy what you're selling and present that message in such a way that the message will have an impact on the surfer and not get lost in a screen full of blank spaces.
That's not to say that empty space in an advertisement isn't a good idea ... empty space can have an impact but it needs to be planned and not just there because you designed your site for a smaller screen than what the surfer is using.
So how wide is too wide?
What set width should you use for the sites that you design? Recently Steve and I stopped to consider that question. We looked at our server stats and we looked at the stats that Google Analytics serves up and we decided that it was time to step up from a width of 750 pixels ... the one that was just right for an 800 pixel screen width ... and start working with a width of 950 pixels.
There are times with our mainstream work where we might consider stepping down to that earlier 750 pixel width but that depends on just who is going to be looking at the site that we're building. If the site was going to be for a local community where most people hadn't upgraded to more modern monitors then we might still build at a set width of 750 pixels.
In a few months Steve and I will look at that width again and see what our stats are telling us but for now it's 950 pixels unless the client ignores our advice and demands something wider.