Width Redemption

1 August 2006

I finally feel redemption.

All these months that I’ve been banging on about fluid width sites and the perils of designing for a fixed window size have finally been recognised!*

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, July 31, 2006: Screen Resolution and Page Layout

The executive summary of his article is exactly what I’ve been saying for ages: most people use 1024×768, but not everyone uses it. To compound that, many people don’t maximise their windows anyway, so make sure your site is fluid and looks nice at a wide variety of resolutions and window sizes.

Back in the day – I’m talking pre-dotcom boom here – I was a big Jakob Nielsen fan. I still stand by that to a certain extent – if you are a web developer / designer you need to go and read every single article on the site, no questions asked. While some of the articles may be out of date, all of the logic behind them is valid and I think it really helps to get a bit of perspective some times.

However, I’m not really sure where he’s heading now. The site seems to feel really old – not from an aesthetics point of view, as it’s always looked old, but from a world outlook point of view. Jakob may still know he stuff when it comes to basic usability, as this post on page width shows, but I really don’t think he’s caught on to more recent changes in the tech world such as blogging, MySpace and RSS.

You get the feeling his head is still back in 1999, although with the amount of consulting he does coupled with the general state of many big business sites maybe the true internet revolution has passed him by.

* I have no doubt that Jakob Nielsen has not read my site, but who cares!

From: Articles

1 August 2006