Going wider

Yesterday I was asked by someone on Skype why we’d chosen to go with a wider page design for Idolblog, ideal for screen resolutions of 1024px wide and up. It’s a good question. The community site had a lot of content to organise and display. Instead of scrolling downwards to see content, we wanted users to be able to see more of it up front – especially on the home page and forum pages. We wanted to focus on providing a better user experience.

Site stats show 12-14% of visitors are using screen resolutions which are less than this (all 800px wide) and we felt that this was small enough a number to make the switch to a wider page design. For those visitors, we’re looking at tweaking the design to show a slightly different layout (using a simple javascript switch like I’ve used on TalkCrunch) – but in the meantime they (unfortunately) see a horizontal scroll bar and miss seeing the rightmost sidebar (not any core content). We’ve had one regular member complain (and our members have been great at providing feedback at the site’s being updated), but she’s about to upgrade monitors too.

Lots of (big name) sites are doing this now, including:

• CNN
• NY Times
• ESPN
• NBA

Designers are also making the switch, including:

• Subtraction
• A List Apart

Granted, the decision about page layout (fixed width, browser width vs screen resolution, liquid layouts, combination layouts) is an endless debate and is one of the web designers’ holy wars which I’d rather not get into here. There’s probably not ever going to be one solution which works best for all users and all sites.

Digital web has a helpful article on this topic.