Well, after our final presentations on Wednesday (4/29), I realized that all this time I had my website at a really distorted width/height dimension that made it look…well, fat. Too fat to see in one screen. I also realized that my laptop was at a lower resolution than it should have been, which explained why everything looked fine on my laptop, but then looked bloated on everything else! Moral of the story…work on your website/blog from another computer from time to time!
Anyway, now that I have my website fixed, I was able to get it all to fit within the width of one screen, but still have to scroll up and down to get to the bottom.
Which got me to thinking…how important is it for a website to display all of its information in one screen? Does having to scroll down (or to the right) hurt a website’s “userfriendliness”? I’ve noticed that some websites out there, like the New York Philharmonic have everything in one “area” that does not include any scrolling down to see other parts of the page. On the other hand, sites like the Los Angeles Philharmonic definitely need to be scrolled down to see the whole thing. Granted, they do include the most important links and information at the top, but I still wonder how much potential information is missed when people have to scroll down.
This reminds me of my days as a Journalism graduate student at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (what a semester that was). I remember learning in class about some kind of statistic regarding newspaper/magazine layout that stated, “you lose 50% of your readers ‘at the break’”–meaning, if you have to split your article up between different pages, or worse, different sections of the newspaper or magazine, you lose a lot of readers at the article break. I wonder if this kind of mindset applies to websites too.
I do admit that it is a pain sometimes to have to scroll…it’s much nicer when everything fits in one page, scroll-free. Hmmm…guess I have a lot more work to do on my website….
I have been thinking about this a lot as I build my own site. I find that I like being able to see the bulk of information in the main screen without scrolling. Although, this means that some images and text may need to be smaller to fit. I wonder, how does that impact on people with vision challenges. For example, my mom is almost 80 and I know that she gets frustrated with smaller text and images. Just a thought…
Maybe one solution can be to use the “parent” option that allows us to click on a link that then brings the reader to a part of the page that is lower down. This way we can put all the important information at the top and allow the reader to click on links to bring them to the more detailed info below, rather than having to scroll down themselves.