Much is talked about when it comes to the real estate of a printed page and that of a web page especially when it comes to the placement of images and text.
It is therefore important to consider how much of the real estate will be used for a header and footer which may include the web site logo and self advertisement. Will the page be segmented into panes with the customary left pane for navigation and the right pane for the body of the subject?
The web developer has to take into consideration if the page will employ frames and therefore using vertical scrolling or a fixed page of determinant size. Both have their place in web design. When we consider a web site selling a product then they would want the product image and primary description to be in a non-scrolling main page with a link to a full specification and description, in practice this rarely happens and site owners are determined to fill their pages with other sales oriented information.
Another area that causes much debate when developing a web site is the screen resolution of the clients’ machine. If one chooses to create all web site for a resolution of 1024 x 768 then as this is the most common screen resolution everyone should be happy, not necessarily.
Consider some statistics from OneStat.com who are a company who sole role in life is to provide statistical analyses on web site traffic and user preferences. They state the following with regard to screen resolution usage: -
The missing 7% use either a higher or lower resolution. This being the case, by arbitrarily using the “most common” resolution results in some 25% of users having to scroll horizontally to view the subject matter. Lynch and Horton in their book Web Style Guide state “It's bad enough to have to scroll in one (vertical) direction; having to scroll in two directions is intolerable”. How true. For this reason it was agreed that the web site produced for this project would be designed to suit 800 X 600 thus covering some 95% of users.
Lynch
and Horton
make an interesting observation, although we may choose a resolution of 800
X 600 there are still “Safe Areas” to consider. If we use the entire
width of 600 pixels for text and an old browser is used then if a user wants
to print the web page there is still the possibility that they would lose characters
at the end of each line. They suggest the following as being the maximum usable
sizes.