Re: FN-FORUM: sight cheque

date posted 11th August 2003 13:40

yep, i have to agree to some extent... my concern was more about the
bad use of negative space once you scrolled the window...

it looks like the central elements are just 'floating around'.... and
this isn't particularly a fault with this site, it happens with most
news portal sites, and to me that looks crap.

there are a lot of news portal sites out there that have fixed layouts,
and www.bbc.co.uk is a particularly good example of one that *works*

even the freelancers.net site is a fairly successful example of making
good use of this scrollable space with it's use of vertical bars -
giving the central area some kind of purpose.

i had exactly this problem on a news portal site i was working on two
years ago, where the content in the sidebars wasn't long enough to keep
up with the central portion, and we solved the problem by making the
centre expand, whilst the sidebars remained fixed. it didn't look
ugly, and worked really well as we spent the time to make sure that
text flowed in good way around the images. we used a lot of CSS to
control the typography and the site worked. unfortunately, i can't
offer an example page as the site never launched due to the financial
crash in 2000..... maybe i can dig something out of the archives :-D

luke


On Monday, August 11, 2003, at 01:53 PM, Sam Morgan wrote:

> No offence BUT, I would say DO NOT make your content expand,
> especially for
> a news/portal sites. The reasons are, 1. you have control of the flow
> of
> text and images on the page. 2. the reason news papers are in columns
> is so
> people can scan read down the page, if the text is to long that is very
> hard/impossible to do. 3. Read this
> http://deyalexander.com/presentations/pagedesign.pdf. 5 Example site
> www.BBC.co.uk 4. I think it looks ugly. :)..