Why are websites often located on both sides of the content?

Question

I noticed that many sites left several places on both sides of the page. What is the reason for this? Is this part of web design standards?

Answer 1

Typically, you want your content to appear on all monitors of a reasonable size without the need for horizontal scrolling. One way to do this is to make sure your content is not wider than a certain number of pixels (say, 760 ishs for 800x600 or 960ish monitors if you want to configure 1024x768 as the minimum monitor size).

Another option is liquid layouts, which extend to the size of the browser window, but are usually harder to code and often equally undesirable for very large monitors (do people really want the site to be stretched at 1900x1200 resolution?).

Answer 2

Hmm, I can come up with a good place for this, which may or may not exist, but this is not StackOverflow ;-) But anyway: this is because people find it easier to read lines of text that consist of no more than 68 characters long. (Or something like that). The human eye can only take so much at a time, and if you make your text too wide, people will lose traces of the left side of the line as soon as they move to the right side, which makes it harder to read. Basically, you want the entire width of the text to correspond to one field of view (for some definition of "field of view").

Answer 3

It discusses fixed Vs fluid layouts. There are many discussions that cover this topic. To name a few:

• Smashing magazine
• Flyte
• About.com

In a nutshell:

Fixed width

A fixed site layout has a fixed-width wrapper, and the components inside it have either a percentage width or a fixed width. The important thing is that the container (wrapper) element is set so as not to move

Fluid width

In a website’s liquid layout, also called a liquid layout, most of the components inside have a percentage width and thus adjust the screen resolution of the user.

Your question concerned a fixed layout and its pros, to name a few:

• Fixed-width layouts are much easier to use and simplify customization on time for development.
• The widths are the same for each browser, so there is less hassle with images, shapes, videos, and other fixed-width content.
• There is no need for a minimum width or max-width, which is not supported by every browser in any case.
• Even if the website is designed to be compatible with the smallest screen resolution, 800 × 600, the content will still be wide enough resolution easy to read

.

Answer 4

Usually you center your site with a "wrapper" in the middle of the screen via css:

 #wrapper { width:960px; margin:0 auto; } <div id="wrapper">content</div> 

Answer 5

My preference is to use the layout of the fluid to some reasonable width (e.g. 1024 pixels), and then use a fixed width. For more information and code explaining how to do this, see: How to optimize web page width .

Answer 6

It is easier to read text if it does not touch the edges of the window.

Answer 7

There is space on both sides of the page. this is because you set a specific size for your page and center it to make sure your visitor sees it.

On the other hand, there are some sizes that are widely used, for example, you can see many sites with a width of 950 pixels, 1000 pixels and 995 pixels, this is due to common law, which provides the best search for your site in 1024 resolution.