quick thought.

I was reading an article on web design from scratch that was on current web styles. He was talking about layout techniques and how left align and full-screen liquid layouts have become less popular. What I thought was interesting was the comment on how we [web users],

"seem to be more comfortable with scrolling, and we're willing to put up with scrolling for the benefits of increased white space and line height."

I completely agree but what provoked this post was the question: why? My immediate reaction was that it was due to changes in hardware. I think that more of us have a mouse that has a scroll-wheel on it, thereby making the centered, longer pages easy to access, rather than moving over to the scrollbar to navigate. Is that the answer, I don't know, but I think it has a lot to do w/it.

I've been working on accessible design lately, but I'm finding that I don't like how liquid design looks in most instances especially on my 20" widescreen LCD (1680x1050). I'm partial to a smaller width site that is accessible from 800x600 resolutions and up. Besides, there has to come a point when you make a cutoff as to who is truly going to view your site. For something like Ebay and Amazon, I see the validity of liquid dexterity for full screen usage. But if you're designing for yourself or a niche market that has been profiled to be net and tech savvy, make the site how you want it to look. Typically those people won't be running super small screens and IE5! That's why a good foundation is needed (user profile, wireframe, etc.) so you can eliminate those headaches early and focus on making da goot chit man!


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