An increasingly important issue (finally) is making sites accessible to disabled audiences, particularly those with vision limitations. This is an area that presents enormous challenges to a design scheme.
At the most extreme end of the scale, completely blind internet users often use 'readers': software applications that read aloud the content of websites and allow the user to interact with the site based on audible options presented to them (like a link, for example). Not surprisingly, the visual design of the site makes little difference to them, but the page structure does. Again, this is a specialised topic that we will not cover in depth here.
A much larger group of people have vision restrictions that affect their ability to read content off of a screen. Partially sighted users will struggle with text that is too small, and a lack of contrast between text and the background it sits on will only make this worse. Those with colour blindness are affectedly differently, although contrast plays a key part here too.
But perhaps the most overlooked group, particularly for consumer-facing sites, are the elderly. They will typically struggle with small text and low-contrast content too, and they form an increasingly large percentage of the internet-using population.
Most of these groups will want to view their text to larger sizes, and ideally on as simple a layout as possible. So for them, in theory, a layout that expands as the text size increases will help to keep their text passages within the optimum legibility range. This is an argument for scalable designs, and one that should be seriously considered for sites whose audiences are likely to include a large percentage of users in these categories.
We believe that in most cases, many of these groups would benefit most from well-designed text-only site versions, or alternative environments designed specifically to cater for specialist need users. Some major organisations have begun to appreciate the value of this (not least, politically) and we will no doubt see more commitment to accessible environments over coming years.
Last, but not least among out three key areas is the brand. Many factors affect the impact a brand has on a website user, and the use of screen space would appear to be only one small one.
In fact, how the screen is used plays a major part in the overall approach to the design scheme, and as such can have a major effect on the brand and how it is delivered to its online customers. The strongest brands manage their visual and interactive identity carefully to form a coherent part of their total brand experience.
As result, we often find that highly brand-led organisations request site designs where more of the screen space is given over to elements that define the brand personality. They are also keen, quite rightly, to ensure that the integrity of the design is maintained at all times. In a quick survey of major brands that we carried out, the overwhelming majority had opted for fixed-width sites.
For the mostpart, we feel that this is appropriate, as fixed-width sites provide greater control over consistent visual layout while remaining accessible to the widest possible audience. But the perception of a brand online is about far more than visual consistency, so this should never be considered a golden rule.
Probably the most important factor overall is that of assessing and addressing target customers only, not the entire internet population. Sometimes, you can safely ignore overall internet statistics and design to a window size that is larger than the norm if you can demonstrate that your target customers all use monitors with higher resolutions. A number of image libraries have taken this approach, for example, as the vast majority of designers require high-resolution monitors.
Of course, computer hardware changes all the time, and as time passes we can expect the minimum resolution in general use to continue to rise. However, that does not mean that we should keep increasing the size we design to: few people on larger monitors size their windows to fill the entire screen.
Some PC manufacturers are now producing laptops with small displays that have very high resolutions, presenting different problems. These screens are ergonomically poor as they demand hawk-like eyesight to read them and are not comfortable at their standard resolutions (which is the only resolution they are really clear at). However, the additional work area is proving attractive to buyers, almost all of whom will scale up their text size to make reading comfortable.
As most of these laptops are purchased into corporate environments, this will be a particular consideration for business-to-business communications.
Clearly, there is no 'right answer'. Each case needs to be taken on its merits and assessed carefully, with particular attention paid to the target audience.
However, in our experience and at this time of writing, the safest approach is to design to a fixed width that fits 800x600 pixel monitors. Why? It's simple: they still account for roughly 45% of monitors in use (a surpisingly high number of those in business); a well designed layout for 800x600 gives highly legible text line lengths; they print well on all major paper sizes; and most brand owners prefer a well-controlled layout.
There is also the small matter that in the majority of cases pages really don't need to be much wider than that. Sure, larger screens, as they become the baseline, will help us introduce more space and improve overall legibility, but the best sites designed today do not suffer for their support of 800x600 pixel screens.
Remember, simpler sites always work better, so focus on reducing what each page contains, rather than worrying about whether there's enough space to fit everything you have.
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