If I am not mistaken, sites are getting wider. IMO, they somehow look more professional if they are wide. But I don't want to go too wide if that will discourage readership. What's your opinion on this? My viewers are not website designers or technical people. Just ordinary users.
lucy24
8:25 am on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)
The ideal width is all of them. The magic word is Responsive.
If I am not mistaken, sites are getting wider.
Or, depending on where you look: much, much narrower.
IMO, they somehow look more professional if they are wide.
Well, wouldn't it be a boring place if we all had the same opinion ;)
ron_ron
11:43 am on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)
OK, Lucy, you made your point. I am new to Responsive and am interested. Is this bootstrap? Are there any decent templates for doing this. I had a brief look at some on guthub in the getting started examples. But it looks kind of bare-bones looking.
topr8
12:31 pm on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)
Twitter Bootstrap is a framework that you can use for responsive design.
- personally i rolled my own, but my requirements were very simple.
Marshall
12:46 pm on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)
The ideal width is all of them. The magic word is Responsive.
Not necessarily true depending on the nature of the site. While responsive designs are ideal, a maximum width is a good idea. If you have a site with a lot of text, like this one, a blog or similar, a paragraph becomes a very, very, very long sentence on wider screens and difficult to read, not to mention it looks rather stupid. Personally, I max out main content areas at 800px which is still a good guideline.
Marshall
ron_ron
12:53 pm on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)
I just looked at some nice responsive templates on template monster. The templates there seem max out at a nice width.
drhowarddrfine
5:17 am on Feb 1, 2013 (gmt 0)
It's not the nature of the site, or the device, but the content. Maxing out a site at 800px doesn't make sense if you have a blog with 14px text. If you want to properly set a paragraph, you want to keep it to 2-3 alphabets wide which, in most cases, works out to 640px max. but what if you have two columns? Or two images intead? What if your user is on a phone and switches to his desktop or his iPad?
What we do is not look at the width of the page but the width of the content. One site we just finished looks pretty good with the same content on the phone but you can switch to a Mac 27-inch monitor full width and it still looks like it was designed that way. But our content allowed us to do that and not all web sites have that flexibility.
Not once do we say, how wide is the screen when we do this. We always say, how wide can we make this paragraph or image before its maxed out or we slide something else in (or out).
I could go on and on but it's a lot more work than simple sites of the past.
