I know for US users both sites ask you to select your region the first time you visit the site. You will never see the choice again so long as you don’t dump your cookies or go into preferences and reset it. Don’t know what the sites do on your side of the world, but I’d wager that you were asked the first time you arrived at the site and have never seen it since, which is exactly the same type of transparency that I imagine for my idea.
It seems like we’re not going to be able to talk you out of this idea. Several people in this thread have mentioned that reading a website in the way you propose would be difficult. This theory was also taught to me in every design and typography class I’ve ever taken, so I tend to agree with that.
There’s also been people (mainly myself) telling you how difficult this would be from a technical standpoint, and that the gain between what already exists as a common default (1000 pixels) and your recommended resolution (1280) isn’t exactly a hugely beneficial difference. So you’re basically suggesting that companies should spend over twice as much time developing and maintaining part of a website in which you will lose legibility and functionality.
I do understand your point, so please don’t think I’m just not reading clearly. There is obviously wasted space on many, many websites that could be used for ads or additional content. However, using up this “wasted” space will make a website harder to read and navigate. Please refer to the aforementioned Google and Yahoo links as an example.
I’m not saying that what you’re suggesting is impossible or even that it NEVER would have a useful application. It is technically difficult, but certainly not impossible. For most applications it would be a useless and even intrusive addition, but maybe there is 1 or 2 exceptions. It is also not a new idea, and if there was any compelling reason for companies to take the time and money required to develop a website like you suggest, they certainly would be developed by now…
Well, all the dissent regarding readability seemed to misunderstand and assume that I wanted pages to stretch across the width of the screen using the width=100% attribute ruining the paragraph structure. I attempted to clarify that I was essentially advocating what sounds like an advantageous implementation of the existing common modular approach.
This is a well done double wide website.
Just want to pop in and say that wasson and I have about the same professional credentials, and I agree with what he’s saying.
Web site width is an extremely tedious part of design that comes early in the site design process. It’s already a huge pain in the ass. It already eats up time. Filling the right amount of space with the right amount of elements is harder than it seems. You have to put a lot of thought into how all possible types of content will fit into your designated spaces, too.
The Web is a visual medium but it’s more than a newspaper. You’ve got forms and videos and pictures and logos and captions and headlines and diagrams and all sorts of things co-mingling on pages.
What you’re proposing would be dynamite for a simple page that perhaps had 4 columns…ads/text/text/ads. Just set the ads column widths to static then set the text column widths percentages and make the whole table 100% and you can make the page look dandy anywhere from 800 to 1600. It would work for 2-column Wordpress blogs with stretchy headers. It would work for text-heavy sites for sure.
But that’s about it. Most sites that make money are not just text-based sites. They have modules, yes. Modules that can be stretched, maybe…but moved? No. You move one thing you have blank space and have to fill it. You make the column wider, it gets shorter. If you have vertical items on the page lined up nicely with horizontal items, and you stretch or shrink or move one of those items, the whole thing goes to pot.
You’re really thinking of the Web as a medium too close to newspaper. It’s not. Lots of graphic designers I work with equate it too much to magazines/brochures (they tend to submit very static designs). It’s not like those either. It’s its own medium that requires slightly different thinking and slightly different skills in order to make it look right because instead of having a single solitary display format, every single reader/user brings their own.