TEmelie – web design blog

Manage your space and your whitespace
The vast majority of people are often so focused on creating a great layout that the only aspects they analyze are tables, CSS, frames etc. This is great but in most cases it leads to ignoring the basics of Web Layout, which in turn translates into mistakes that could have easily been avoided. For instance use the whole space without giving the impression that you are trying to do just that. An easy way to realize that is by using relatively sized layout sections. In this way they will contract and expand to adjust the browser window.

One more important aspect of Web Layout is represented by the monitor resolution. The days of 640×480 are long gone and you need to be aware of that. You should kick yourself upside the head if you lose customers because the only thing they can see on their monitor is a logo.
Here is an easy way to make your Web page look like it’s resizing for different browser windows. This is how you do it: define the spaces by using colors. What this means is that by centering the page on the browser and adding a background of a different color, the page will display nicely both on large browsers, which will display more background color, as well as on smaller browsers which will have little or no background color at all.

Images and Graphics
One of the Top 10 killers of Web Layout are images. Slap an image at random on your page and that will be the end of it. The img tag followed by text will get you an image and a line of text to it’s right. Try using instead the align attribute which will help you with you’re layout. Also keep mind that you need to maintain a balance between graphics and text. Don’t get carried away and use lots of images as this will make your page extremely difficult to read. What you need to remember is that images are a major part of the design so choose your layout carefully.

Text
In this part I would like to say a couple of things about the so called “scan length”. This refers to the number of words that people can read at a comfortable level on a single line. Most browsers respond best at a scan length to 7 to 11 words per line. Anything higher than that leads to a text that is hard to read, anything less means a text distracting. In conclusion make sure that the main text area displays the text in readable width.

Centering isn’t something that you want to undertake because is very difficult to do well and is hard to read.

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