Width Stats

3 May 2006

I know I keep on banging on about it, but it’s important.

Yes, flexible width sites again (sorry about that).

I’ve noticed in the aftermath of this year’s css reboot that there’s been quite a ground swell of negativity aimed at the abundance of very wide sites. Simon Collison has posted a very illuminating post on his blog, CollyLogic, which has some actual statistics on window width sizes, which is obviously very useful for this debate.

I don’t think there’s anything too surprising in these stats; if you design for 1024px wide and greater, your going to be irritating about 20-30% of your users. Do you really want 30% of your users to have horizontal scrollbars?

It’s all A List Apart’s of course; they’re influential enough that even if they do something as short sighted fixed width, wide layout people will still copy them.

“A List Apart does it, so it must be ok.”

I’m still all about fluid widths; almost every site – bar quick half day jobs – I’ve made in the last 9-10 months has been fluid. I’m still not hugely keen on the variable fixed width solution like what CollyLogic uses, with a shifting right column, as I’m not a big fan of the flexible gaps you get at the side (I like to control my white space…); it’s certainly a solution that works however, and a darn site better then anything fixed width.

From: Articles

3 May 2006