Therefore, it??™s often good practice to limit the width of body copy on a website to
a comfortable reading width. Also, if you have multiple pieces of content that you want
the user to be able to access at the same time, columns can come in handy. This can be
seen in the following screenshots from the Thalamus Publishing website (www.
thalamus-books.com).
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As you can see, the main, central column of the About page provides an overview of the
company. To the left is the site-wide search and an advertisement for one of the company??™s
publications; and to the right is a sidebar that provides ancillary information to support
the main text. This provides text columns that are a comfortable, readable width, and
enables faster access to information than if the page content were placed in a linear, vertical
fashion.
Fixed vs. liquid design
As already mentioned in this book, the Web is a unique medium in that end users have
numerous different systems for viewing the web page. When designing for print, the
dimensions of each design are fixed, and although television resolutions are varied (PAL,
NTSC, HDTV), those designing for the screen work within a fixed frame??”and regardless of
the size of the screen, the picture content is always the same.
In a similar fashion, it??™s possible to design fixed-width sites for the Web. The earlier shot of
the Thalamus Books site is an example of this. Fixed-width sites are beneficial in that they
enable you to position elements exactly on a web page.
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