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Fixed Width vs Fluid Designs Print E-mail
Written by Adam Audette, Moderator
July 12, 2006

Fixed vs. Fluid Designs: Why Fixed?

I received an email from an LEDer this week wondering about fixed width websites vs. "fluid" designs. She wasn't posting, just wondering why anyone would *want* a fixed width site, especially when CSS and XHMTL allow for such clever fluid designs. Since I'm not experienced in Web design, and this sort of topic is right up LED's alley, I'll leave it up to the list to answer her. Why Fixed?

Adam



Written by Kathy Wilson
July 13, 2006


Why either / or? Why not a combination of both, which is what I find works best when trying to appease all the various sizes of monitors on which my websites and those of my clients will be viewed. I use fixed width for the outside columns as well as any columns in the header and footer which may have need for specific placement, and variable width for the center column with the content.

By the way, while CSS and XHMTL may offer "clever fluid designs", I find that often the components in these designs overlap each other, making the text impossible to read. This doesn't happen using the old-fashioned method of tables and plain vanilla HTML.

Love,

Kathy Wilson
under-one-roof.net



Written by Shari Thurow
July 13, 2006


Hi Adam-

I am going to go out on a limb here and give some reasons for using fixed-width designs.

One of the main reasons I use them (usually at a client's request) is for placement reasons. With A/B and multivariate testing, placement of important elements on a page, such as the primary call-to-action, can make or break an ROI of a landing page. With a fluid-width design, measurements are not nearly as accurate as with fixed-width designs.

Another reason, believe it or not, is Web site usability. I find it highly amusing that usability professionals and CSS zealots commonly tout fluid-width layouts as the best layout. In reality, when it comes to ease of reading (number of words per line), fluid-width layouts do not necessarily make reading easier. Then again, it depends on the type of Web page one is creating (news, reference, commerce, etc.) Nonetheless, ease of reading is one reason that fixed-width can be more effective.

Branding is also another reason. Many corporations consider their brands (and the visual representation of their brands) to be of the utmost importance. Although no Web developer / designer can completely control how a Web page is displayed on a browser, there are some things we can do to limit how a page is displayed. A fixed-width layout is one way to control how a page is displayed to support a brand.

Web design is all about balance. If a fixed-width layout gives a slightly longer download time but a better ROI, then I'll use the fixed-width layout. I don't implement a design strategy merely because a CSS zealot or usability professional recommends it. I am going to measure and test with my clients' target audience.

On a different note, in response to Mekhong Kurt's post in LED #2202, my apologies for using the word "whining." If it was perceived as being too harsh and personal, it was not my intent. My intent was to demonstrate that (in general) many wannabe speakers complain about wanting things without really working hard for them. It was not meant as a personal attack, and I apologize if I came off that way.

I saved a separate post for book publishers. That is another area where people complain without understanding the amount of work that it takes to pitch a book and to get it published.  Another topic, another time.

Sincerely,

Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director
Grantastic Designs, Inc.



Written by Beth Ann Earle
July 13, 2006


Why fixed?

On a very basic (and somewhat flip) level, because that's what our creative director recommends, and we trust her implicitly (that part's not flip -- she is absolutely the real deal).

Also, we're really not looking for clever, fluid designs: Most of our clients are b2b on a budget, and they want something straightforward that conveys their value message, makes them look like a brand leader and increases the prospect's trust in them. We've had a lot of success in delivering just that with fixed-width sites.

Fixed width, obviously, isn't the only solution, and fluid works well for all sorts of sites with all sorts of different target audiences and goals. My only point is that, for the time being, we lean toward fixed widths for the sites we develop because it seems to suit our purposes and, most importantly, our clients' needs.

Shari Thurow did a great job of explaining why fixed-width sites can be a better option than fluid-width sites in some instances. Our creative director has explained many of those same things to me several times, but I'll be danged if I can explain it to anybody else, especially not as well as my fellow LED'er did. Thanks, Shari!

With warm wishes to all LED'ers (those with both fixed and fluid widths),

Beth Earle
pilotfishseo.com



Written by Mary Lee
July 17, 2006


I think the question should be Why Not Fixed? I have been doing web design about 8 years now. My current design is pure very fluid CSS & I love it. I have always designed on a percentage model instead of a fixed size.

When I started designing web pages, monitors were 640x480. Next came 800x600 to muddy the waters and then 1024x768... well anyone who has a monitor NOT set to 1024x768 can tell you that those people who design a fixed page for 1024x768 monitors are evil. Well maybe not 'really' evil, but they have to be the only ones to offer the content or the back and forth scrolling to read will last all of about 2 seconds before we click away. In my home alone I have 2 computers on 1024 and 3 on 800. Hubby has his on 800 but zooms all his pages as he is hard of seeing at the advanced age of 49:-)

Here are some helpful figures on percentage of browser resolutions used:

1024 x 768 is 56.15%
1280 x 1024 is 15.79%
800 x 600 is 12.04%
1280 x 800 is 4.09%
1152 x 864 is 3.90%

So design in fixed width for a 1024 & you lose about 30% of your viewers. May not seem like that much, but as a business I find it to be way too high a figure to ignore by designing with fixed width.

Mary Lee
dinnerandamurder.com



Written by Martha Retallick
July 17, 2006


Since I'm a big believer in it, I've implemented "fluid" design on my three websites, and strongly recommend it to my clients as well. I like the versatility of a design that can expand to fit the website visitor's browser window. Note that the key word in the previous sentence is "expand," because it plays a major role in this saga.

Well, sorry to break the news to all of you "fluid fans," but two of my observant clients have discovered a problem with this type of design. They have found that when they shrink their browser windows, a big on-screen pileup ensues. To see this problem for yourself, go ahead and click on my sigfile URL, and shrink your browser window.

Mind you, shrinking the browser window isn't something that occurs to many people. They prefer to view their websites full screen, or not at all.

What do you do when you find that you're designing for the browser-shrinkers who abhor on-screen pileups? Well, apologies again, but here's Martha with more bad news. The solution is to use fixed-width design.

Martha Retallick
westernskycommunications.com



Written by John Smart
July 17, 2006

If you have a 'letterbox' screen then no matter how you measure 'ROI' on your web page, the page will look poor - even if you take some preventative steps with centering the body and having a surrounding repeating background.

A fluid page is more work, and much harder to do well than fixed, and I understand why some would shy away from such a commitment, but like most of the advanced aspects of web design, hard work, dedication and perseverance can bring fantastic results.

Even Amazon has a semi-fluid site, with the center column expanding between the outer two. I think when it comes to maximizing ROI, the Amazon model is one we would all like to be able to follow!

John Smart
InternetDesign.com



Written by Scott Smith
July 18, 2006

> What do you do when you find that you're designing for the
> browser-shrinkers who abhor on-screen pileups? ... The
> solution is to use fixed-width design.
    - Martha Retallick

I disagree.

Here's an easier solution: toss in a 750px wide spacer image into your main table. The table can still stretch as much as needed, but it'll only shrink down to a minimum of 750 wide (or whatever width you feel still results in a legible, functional site).

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

Take care!

Scott Smith
Globi Web Solutions



Written by Michael Linehan
July 18, 2006

> Even Amazon has a semi-fluid site, with the
> center column expanding between the outer two.
    - John Smart

Amazon is not fully fluid. The central content column of Amazon is fixed width. Just the white space between the columns increases. Personally, I don't see how that is any better than the corresponding fixed width structure.

For a fully fluid structure, the content column soon stretches to lines of horrible length. Our brains are highly habituated to dropping to the next line after about a book length line.  Reading maybe 30 words per line rapidly becomes very tiring.  I think all the fluid layouts I've encountered have this line-length problem. So then the window has to be resized anyway.

And fixed width does not mean 1024.  Perhaps an example is useful. I had no difficulty fitting this client site into a 740 pixel width - www.sentrytelecare.com.  So the site is easily readable at the common resolutions.

Actually, there is one other point that is interesting to me.  I don't understand the designating of "fluid" as advanced.  I know there are crossovers on various "advocate" sites of advanced CSS and DHTML techniques.  On CSS Zen Garden (an astounding site, if you don't know it), the layout is fluid - leading, once more, to horrible line length --- 38 words on my screen!!!  To make the text comfortable, the window has to be shrunk to about 800 anyway!

So I don't see fluid as "advanced" at all.  I like to read my content on a "page".  Word documents present the content fixed: the content doesn't dance around with the size of your window. Same with Photoshop. Some with InDesign.  Same with my calendar program, and so on.  Why this different model for the Web?  I like the Sentry Telecare site sitting there with a nice, comfortable line length. :)  And yes, I know that can vary according to different browser displays or individual user settings.  But in general, it's going to be around the length my brain expects lines of text to be, not jump to 30 plus words per line.

Michael Linehan
Marketing Alchemy



Written by Mo Douglas
July 18, 2006

Mary Lee gaves us the following figures and claimed that this would lose you ~30% of your visitors:

1024 x 768 is 56.15%
1280 x 1024 is 15.79%
800 x 600 is 12.04%
1280 x 800 is 4.09%
1152 x 864 is 3.90%

I would like to disagree with that number, it is in fact a lot smaller at ~12%. I think she probably added the top 2 resolutions and subtracted from 100%, however any user with a resolution set equal to or higher than 1024x768 would have no problem with a site set at 1024x768. In her figures that adds another 8%, and I would assume that there are some more in the missing 10%.

The point is valid though, I'm just nitpicking :)

Reason I write though is that while I do like the fluid design, it can cause issues. My site, thailandstories.com for instance, uses a fluid design and it works fine. Mostly. I myself have set my monitor to 1280x1024 and if I were to read my site with my browser full screen it would be very hard to read the stories. Even at 1024x768 it is already hard to read.

On these high resolutions using a third column would solve the problem (or at least reduce it), but of course this would make it too hard for those on 800x600 to read. Suggestions welcome, btw? :) Setting my browser to about 880x1000 is my preferred way of browsing, btw.

Mo Douglas
thailandstories.com



Written by Kerry Branham
July 18, 2006

> The solution is to use fixed-width design.
    - Martha Retallick

Martha's right here.  I've been a proponent of using a combination of fluid for the outer fringes of a site, and fixed width for the rest.  There's still an awful lot of people who have their browsers set at 800 x 600 (me included), because they are either using small screens or monitors (I know people that are using 10" and 12" notebooks).  I don't own anything larger than a 15" monitor, and I would like to see the text and images a little larger than 1024 x 768 gives me.  Heck, I bet there are still people using 14" monitors set at 640 x 480.  On a screen that size, your fluid designs are going to more than cause images to display on the top of text, or the text will run into other text, or a myriad of other things.

My point is that you will have to try and design your site that will work reasonably well for many sizes of browsers and screen resolutions.  I'd rather leave empty space to the right of the website than require a visitor to scroll from side to side to view the site.  No one is going to tell you one way is totally right and others are totally wrong, but the best advice I can give is to put yourself in the shoes of the site visitor.  What would annoy them? What would make them want to keep visiting the site?  Design to those elements, and you will do fine for most people.  And, unless you have unlimited resources and lots of time, the only way to do better is to develop a design that will work at ALL screen sizes.

Kerry Branham
K-S Marketing



Written by Maty Matyszak
July 19, 2006

We're back to horses for courses here. We worked on an educational site with a fixed width design, and found that it gave horrendous problems to students who preferred to print and then read the pages (somehow 'printable page' links passed our university level students by...). At other times fluid design caused a mess when the page was resized, but as the design had to be that way, we needed to fix the page.

So the point is surely, to look at each page and ask - what will my user want to do with this page, and how best to present the material to suit him?  Sometimes fixed will be best, sometimes you will need fluid.

Our default design is a fluid page that should work in 800x600; look best in 1074x768, and expand gracefully in higher resolutions. Those benighted souls using 640x480 can still use the pages with images turned off, and as they are probably on 2400bps modems as well, they would appreciate the bandwidth saving. ;)

Maty Matyszak
Biscuit Software Services Ltd.



Written by Veronica Yuill
July 19, 2006

> Setting my browser to about 880x1000 is
> my preferred way of browsing, btw.
    - Mo Douglas

Exactly! Every time this old chestnut of screen sizes comes up, many contributors seem to assume that everyone runs their browser full-screen. They don't; one of the advantages of large high-res screens is that you can have several windows visible at once and click between them. Plus remember that even if someone is running their browser full-screen they may well have a sidebar open (showing e.g. history, bookmarks, mail ...).

A fluid design (with if necessary some fixed elements) will work properly in this situation. And if I find line lengths too long (unlikely since I only have a a 17" monitor) I pop open the sidebar or resize my browser window to something comfortable for me :-)

My 2 centimes

Veronica Yuill
Archetype IT
archetype-it.com/english



Written by Brad Waller
July 19, 2006

This thread is like Deja Vu.  I know if you search the archives you will see this discussed at least one if not many times, and I know I have made this same post before.

The issue is not what size monitor you or anyone else has.  The issue is what size the browser window is that your visitors are using.  Just because you have data that shows you have lots of people with big monitors does not mean that they have their windows maxed out to the size of the monitor.  For example, on my desktop machines with 1200+ pixel monitors, my browser windows are usually less than 900 pixels wide.

Now that we have the issue of monitor size out of the way, let's talk about fixed vs. fluid.  There may be sites where fluid works, but there are many more where you want to control the look of your site.  You don't have your email window set to the full width of your screen now do you?  Why not?  Because it will be unreadable. Same goes for your site.  You can't let text go too wide or the site becomes unreadable. Unless you have a perfect setup, superwide windows can also mess up layouts, navigation, alignment and more.

The only way to control the look is to have a fixed size.  Center the content and it will still look OK.  Make fluid site on your huge monitor and it will look cramped on a small window.  Make one that looks good in a 700 or 800 pixel wide window and imagine how bad it will look on someone else's 1800 pixel wide screen. If you don't believe me, go to an Apple store and check out your stuff on their 30 inch Cinema Display monitor!

Brad Waller
adjungle.com



Written by Derek Andrews
July 19, 2006

I have always thought it would be a good idea for CSS layout to allow for min and max attributes for widths of columns etc. This would allow one perhaps to set a semi-fluid center column that was always wide enough to accept any graphics you put in there, but with an option for setting a maximum width for a block of text, maybe set as a maximum number of characters to accommodate browser-side font size settings. Does that make any sense?

Derek Andrews, woodturner
myspace.com/derekturnswood



Written by Detlev Johnson
July 20, 2006

Hello everyone,

Regarding fluid design versus fixed width, the conversation seems to have neglected to cover the fact that the information displayed in the design will make or break whichever format you choose. If you choose fixed width, your site is hard to navigate on small screens. If you go with a fluid layout, assume your text lines will not wrap in time before eye fatigue sets in.

Folks with large screens experience eye fatigue reading the Web full screen. Thay also tend to be folks that are aware enough to resize for their own better Web experience. I try not to get caught up thinking my site is the only site surfers see. Just because analytics tells you that x% of visitors have huge screens, does not mean they experienced your site full screen at high resolution. These users have the perfect incentive to resize their Web browser.

As for fixed width, you certainly have control over the display, but then you have to consider all the resolutions and limit your design to the lowest denominator you are comfortable with. Care to design for WebTV? See how it looks full screen on 1200x1600? Then there's the other extreme: fixed width for 800x600 is a lousy experience on a cell phone (or PDA) no matter what your content.

Fluid design with simple information as content can work great on a cell phone. And think about this: it is easier to resize a fluid design window on a large screen than it is to navigate fixed width on a cell phone. If you are looking for the lesser of two evils, fluid design may be the answer you are looking for - but you have to consider the content or it may not work right.

Detlev Johnson, Administrator
SearchReturn Digest



Written by Marty R. Milette
July 20, 2006

The sad thing about this whole issue is that web designers often completely ignore the needs of their visitors -- opting for what THEY like, what looks good on their equipment and how they personally use their systems and browser.

THERE IS NO "PERFECT" ONE-WAY-FITS-ALL DESIGN. The theme of your site and your audience should determine the design choices you make. Elderly people have totally different browsing needs than teenagers, as a simple example. This results in fixed-width sites that don't take advantage of the screen space available, or that force users to scroll. The worst offence is forcing specific typefaces or sizes and preventing the user from changing them.

Are you in this mode? On IE, try a quick test: Select View > Text Size > Largest and see if YOUR site allows the user to change the text size.

For example, my eyes aren't as good as they used to be, so if I am reading 'text-heavy' sites, I LIKE having the ability to increase the text size and take advantage of the full width of my display. Being forced to view text in a tiny font using only 50% of the screen is both a waste of my resources and a major annoyance. (I can't count the number of times I've copied-and-pasted the text from a web site into WordPad JUST to be able to view it conveniently.)

For myself, I prefer to design for an 800 pixel non-scrollable width (a reasonable compromise), with fixed width left and right columns and fluid center column -- using standard HTML and CSS markup -- avoiding fixed-size fonts or widths wherever possible.

For the "control freaks" -- remember this Internet 'thing' is NOT PRINTED MEDIA -- it is an entirely different media with advantages, disadvantages and compromises to consider. If you want to produce digital versions of paper brochures -- why not just put them into a downloadable PDF file where you CAN control everything with exact precision and let people view the web site the way they like or need?

Marty R. Milette



Written by Tom Aman
July 20, 2006

> They have found that when they shrink their browser
> windows, a big on-screen pileup ensues...
    - Martha Retallick

First, your "fluid" design isn't.  You are *assuming* that the only versatility required is to allow the browser window to expand.  A *fluid* design should also permit the browser window to shrink.  It is not really a case of the browser window expanding or shrinking, it is a case of the page design being able to expand or shrink to suit the browser size being used by the surfer.  The problem is that all of the elements on your sample page are not fluid, hence the pileup - the design of this page starts to get into trouble if the browser width is less than ~710 pixels.

Second, while many people view their websites full screen, many do not.  I seldom use my browser full screen because it makes text too hard to read (long lines require a lot of head movement).  Also, people who do a lot of multi-tasking on their computers will often run programs at something less than full screen just because it can be easier to navigate between programs. Another reason is to be able to see the contents within one program while entering the visible data in another.

I don't pretend to know for sure what minimum width would be suitable, that would take a lot of research to establish, but I would expect that a fluid design should still display reasonably well down to something in the order of 500 or 600 pixels wide.

Tom Aman
Aman Software



Written by Mary Lee
July 20, 2006

After reading my post I felt I need to clarify something. I do use some fixed design elements. My outside columns are fixed width to control content in them and the overall look. What I was talking about is the overall design size is best when fluid. My main concern being those that set a table width at 1024 & really cause problems & don't even realize it because they have not bothered to look at their site in any other browsers or resolution.

Mary Lee



Written by Viggie Bala
July 21, 2006

> We're back to horses for courses here.
    - Maty Matyszak

Would like to re-visit 'horses for courses.' Just a bit different here that there can be different horses for the same website. And the 'courses' are the media used to visit the website, like PC, mobiles, PDAs and yes printers, WebTV, Braille and speech synthesizers included.

> We worked on an educational site with a fixed
> width design, and found that it gave horrendous
> problems to students who preferred to print...

You can have a visual layout for on screen display, yet make it print out like a document with just the main content & headings. You don't need any special scripts, just CSS will do. All we have to do is, use different external CSS files for different media. You can hide some parts of the screen for printing [display: none;] and also use different content width & font sizes for mobile, webtv etc.

An official list of recognized CSS medai types & explanations are available here.

Regards,

Viggie Bala
viggie.com



Written by Kathy Wilson
July 21, 2006

Regarding these stats that Mary Lee shared with us in issue 2204:

1024 x 768 is 56.15%
1280 x 1024 is 15.79%
800 x 600 is 12.04%
1280 x 800 is 4.09%
1152 x 864 is 3.90%

I don't know where she got her statistics, but it doesn't matter. You see, the absolute best place to obtain this type of information is your own statistics program for your own website. Each website has a different target market and each group or market has a different percentage of screen resolutions.

I have around 50 website clients that I also host and when I check their statistics, each one shows a different percentage in each monitor resolution size. Typically, there's a wide variation in the numbers.

Love,

Kathy Wilson
under-one-roof.net



Written by James Miller
July 21, 2006

I always design web pages so that they are of a fixed width, where the pages are likely to be printed. As I do a lot of work with lawyers, who like to provide pages that their clients can easily print and take away, this is good sense. One lawyer told me that some of their clients don't have the Internet and they need to give them the information. (In the UK, this lawyer gave up printed pages as things change too often with this fiddling government!)

Interestingly, I was in a City bank a few months ago and their research department, had very big screens. They were displaying A4 documents side-by-side. I believe screens will get bigger and bigger and more and more pages will be designed as A4 pages. Another point is that many newspapers now design so that they are fixed width, with junk and links in the non-printing part. Such as The Times print well.

One of the biggest irritants I find, is web sites that automatically resize your browser. I never buy product from any web site that does that!

James Miller
daisy.co.uk



Written by Mary Lee
July 23, 2006

> I don't know where she got her statistics, but it
> doesn't matter... the absolute best place to obtain
> this type of information is your own statistics
> program for your own website.
    - Kathy Wilson

The stats I quoted were just released by OneStat.com who is the largest provider of real time web analytics. You can see the press release here on their recent findings:

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox43-screen-resolutions.html

I do agree though that your particular customers can be different & you need to design for them. Myself I get a LOT of women ages 40-60 who are hosting social events or parties. That is not to say I don't get others, but these are the majority of my visitors. So I design my type to be larger and easier to read with CSS. I use colors that convey class and money as this is my majority visitor. I try to appeal to my them on every level I can imagine on my site & the results of doing that have been astounding. Kathy is right. Always keep your end user and actual visitors in mind when designing your site and your business.

Mary Lee
Dinner and a Murder Mystery Games



Written by Allen Schaaf
July 23, 2006

> They have found that when they shrink their browser
> windows, a big on-screen pileup ensues...
    - Martha Retallick

Martha, your clients have found one of the key limitations of CSS. If you do the same design in tables <hiss, boo - old fashioned> the pile up does not occur, it just forces a scroll bar.

If W3C had merely added a few features to HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0, and skipped the CSS, you would be able to everything CSS does but simpler and easier. But like most things that are good, people can't resist tarting them up to make them "better."

Best,

Allen Schaaf
Planned Systems, Inc.



Written by Mary Lee
July 24, 2006


I have to disagree with Allen. A pile up can be prevented with CSS. Use of Floating Divs will correct that problem. And there is a reason people are 'tarting' up CSS. It is much faster and gives you extensive control over your layout without bloating your pages.

Look at my text on my site. You could not do that without CSS. There are so many things you can do with CSS that cannot be accomplished with HTML alone. I changed my site from HTML tables to CSS & my visitors and sales almost doubled. The reason? My site now loads very fast, whereas the previous HTML design was bloated and slow loading. On top of that if you will look at my source code you will see very little code and lots of text that those search engine bots eat up!

After the switch to a CSS site, things were slow for a couple months as I dropped down in the search engines. I was concerned, but then my site shot up to the top of all the engines for lots of keywords and has remained steady there. In my opinion the CSS design has contributed greatly to increasing my business and my search engine rankings!

Mary Lee
dinnerandamurder.com



Written by Peter D'Aprix
July 24, 2006

I suspect that because the internet is such a fluid and constantly changing medium, practitioners try to nail down rigid rules and protocalls to give themselves some sense of design security as well as some sense of personal stability. A little more like driving a car down a road that is really a river that changes is course constantly, moves at its own speeds and where you sink up to your eyeballs when you get out of the car. Mark Twain could address that.

How this affects fixed width or fluid width discussions is this. There should not be any rule about this. Deciding on fixed or fluid widths should be tagged solely to the what is best for any particular site, knowing that any decision will be a 49% to 51% process. I have never seen such compromise on benefit/problem factor to any decision as I have with web sites. What seems a good decision viewed from one direction, seems a bad one from another.

Some sites for graphic purposes or programming purposes or both, need to have certain factors locked in. But others can exist quite comfortably with expansion / contraction as their make up.

So, in conclusion, the designer must decided, based on the goals of the site itself, which will work best for the particular application. But then this is true of all aspects of any web site - it is the site and its requirements for functionality, usability, marketability, market space, etc. that should determine all choices made about it. Not some strict rules.

Keep up the good work.

Peter D'Aprix



Written by Valerie Beeby
July 26, 2006

I'm heavily on the side of fluid layouts, but I've been wondering whether Tom, Dick and old Aunt Harriet even know they can resize their browser windows. (In most cases anyway.) Personally I play almost every website I visit like a concertina, expanding and contracting a fluid page until it's just as I like it. Usually with the main text about the width of a newspaper column for easy reading.

Marvellous. But I wonder how many site visitors simply accept their browser's default page size as given, not realising they can alter it?

Valerie Beeby
purple-owl.com



Written by Tom Aman
July 27, 2006

> Marvellous. But I wonder how many site visitors
> simply accept their browser's default page size
> as given, not realising they can alter it?
    - Valerie Beeby

That is a really good point, Valerie.  We tend to *assume* (there's that word again) that everyone knows how to resize their browser.

My wife only really got into really using a computer and the Internet a relatively short time ago (3 years).  After she had been using her computer for a about 6 months, I was helping her research something one day and at one point suggested she max her browser window.  "What do you mean?", she said, "You mean I can change the size of that window?  Why didn't you tell me?".

There followed a long discussion / explanation about resizing, opening multiple browsers, closing windows no longer needed, etc., etc. (all of the things many of us *assume* everyone knows about using their systems).

Tom Aman
Aman Software


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