Entering Bexar County

In all sincerity, I believe the sign says it all, not a lot of room for anything else.

It was offered up as a kramerwetzel.com image, but then, too, with a kitten sleeping on the front seat, I couldn’t dally long. Places to go, cats to feed.

I thought it was a particularly inspired image, on top of an inspired detour to avoid traffic.

Some days, it’s a good idea. Other days? Not so much.

Design Question:
Q: What is a good width for a web page?

A: (blank)

I can’t say. I’ve used fractions (percentages of page), like 80/90 percent, and I’ve used numbers, like 600, 640, 760 and so forth – in pixels.

I can answer in purely sexist manner, one I’m unafraid and unabashed to admit, that a page should be like a skirt, cover enough, but not too much, keep it interesting. However, unlike a skirt, too much white space, and the analogy goes bad.

The pre-rolled software I’ve been using, poking around, I found a couple of “golden ratio” measurements. I plugged those in, and it looked like crap. Maybe I don’t have an eye for design, or maybe there’s another element missing.

How wide should a web page be? There was a time when a minimal size was 640×480 pixels, and as late as a year ago, even less, I had family member still using a machine with that kind of window to see stuff on the web.

I think my phone has bigger viewing area than that.

The original template, the first of the measurable metrics suggested that the upper left corner was the hotspot – put the good stuff, the important ads and critical navigation stuff there.

The “explosion” of blogs and blogging, that hotspot and design standard has changed, as the right-hand nav-bar is much more common, or, like I’m currently using, the left-main, two right-hand support/navigation/advertising/blog columns. I’d give credit where its due, it’s not an original thought. The way blogs are implemented and viewed, that’s changed the standard.

In my never-ending quest for excellence in hyper-text products, it seems that the next upward width standard, the number of pixels liked, required or stipulated, even the 800 screen is going away.

I used net-book like appliance, a MacBook Air, from time to time. I’d like to move about half my work onto an iPad, but that’s not happening too soon. Again, I’m back to the question of width. Assuming the page has to scale across net-books to iPads to 30-inch desktop movie-theater sizes, makes the question more tedious.

The main content still needs to be under 600 wide. After that? I’m less sure.

The question remains, is there a golden ratio to determine the optimal width for a web page?

Two Meat Tuesday (the book)
(cure for the common horoscope)
Pink Cake A commonplace book.