milosevic - 1:06 pm on Dec 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

resolutions is that many have to ZOOM their browsers just to read the "fine print". My commercial sites are 80% centered/fluid at "normal" font.

Excellent point tangor.

While I'm lucky enough to have good eyesight, many sites (such as wikipedia) use text which is too small to read easily from a couple of feet away on the screen I use at home and I have my browser set for these sites to work at a higher zoom level.

I've been experimenting recently with two things:

1. Fluid designs with heavy use of max and min widths, both on the outer container and inner elements - so eg Wordpress theme that works and looks good from about 700px width up to 1600px width (max-width) - but I set a max-width on the div.post article content, otherwise it would become too wide to be easily readable at full width.

2. Fluid layouts/content which drop floats to accommodate narrower widths, for things like photo galleries.

3. Larger default text size - imo this is the best thing to accommodate people with high definition screens, it also allows blocks of text content to be wider in terms of px before length of lines of text becomes too long for readability. I also don't think in terms of accessibility of information it harms display in lower res screens, except in the kind of areas where getting tons of stuff above the fold is important.

There's a couple of other points I'd raise.

Is information not best presented in a portrait format? My thoughts are that information is best presented so that it can be processed from the top down. Sites with stacked sidebars (eg some wordpress themes) I find visually offputting. Yes, you can make a page wider and stick in tons of widgets and sidebars, but is that good user experience?

The Aftenbladet site does create a scrollbar when viewed at 1024px, but the only content that's missing is the adbar on the right hand side - so the site would still be fully usable without horizontal scrolling, it has been designed so that most users viewing fullscreen at 1024px will not notice that part of the page is missing.