I Already Googled It

Here’s a quick disclaimer before I begin: I’m not a web designer.  I don’t want to be a web designer.  This picture pretty much sums up why:

On top of the excellent points raised by the above graphic (I actually do have my own keyboard at work.  I don’t “bring” it though, I bought an extra one so I could leave it there and so it’d always be there waiting for me…) there’s also the fact that I really don’t care how things look.  When you think about it, it doesn’t matter either.  Why does it matter if your website has a billion little JavaScript tricks et cetera as long as it gets the point across?

It doesn’t.

In fact, I’ve noticed that how pretty a site is, and the quality of its content, seem to be inversely correlated.

And then there’s the fact that 9 out of 10 “pretty” sites just don’t work.  At all.

Anyway, this post is about the dirge that is “negative space“.  You go to a site, and you see somewhere in the area of seven miles of totally wasted space on either side of the content.  Either these people never understood that you can size things in CSS proportionally (i.e. set a div to 95% of the screen’s width rather than 800 pixels to appeal to the non-existent viewer who’s still trapped on a circa 1997 monitor), or they think that it’s somehow artistic and appealing.

Sure, negative space is an accepted idea in art and photography, but this is web design.  You’re not trying to appeal to the user with art, you’re attempting to present content, and content has to be read or viewed, and to do that screen real estate is required.  What are you hoping to achieve by wasting 2/3rds of the screen?  Is it your mission in life to make your users use the scroll wheel more?

Here’s an example—the Battle.NET forums (inb4: WoW lol) (I’ve just cut out the left half the screen so the image isn’t too wide/large):

(Haha idiot can’t spell “looking“…)

Seriously, what in the name of God? This might be alright if it was just the topic listing that was like this, but the thread display has this same design, so you wind up scrolling something like 3-4 times the normal amount. Do they think that users find longer pages more appealing or impressive?

If the point of your website is to allow users to enjoy your content, let them enjoy your content! Your “content“—hopefully—isn’t so small that you need “tricks” like this to make appear bigger, or merely the design itself, because if either is the case, you’re pretty fucking vapid, and you need to worry about other things than how nice your page looks.

Or maybe you’re worried about users on widescreen monitors having to constantly look side-to-side?

NEWSFLASH: I bought a widescreen monitor for a reason; I actually wanted it to be wide.  Don’t take that choice away from me you asshole, if I wanted to be compulsive scroll wheel user I would’ve bought a 4:3 monitor, but I didn’t so I don’t.

Also: I’m pretty sure all window managers from the Explorer shell to X Server allow you to resize windows.  If I’m so stupid that I don’t realize my eyeballs move side-to-side in their sockets, and my neck gets sore or something else, I’m either too fucking stupid to matter, or I’ll just make the window thinner and put it in the middle of my widescreen monitor and it will look the same!