Web page size: summary of our advice

Page length Why page width is critical Things which can make pages too wide Recommended maximum widths

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Page length

Page length is hardly ever a big issue - unless you're publishing a complete book on-line.

To make long pages more usable:

• Provide a summary at the top of the page - an abstract and / or a table of contents which acts as a menu.
• Put all critical content and navigation options in the top part of the page.
• Avoid forcing the user to scroll more than 3 times in a page.
• Make it easy to move within the page. At the end of each section include a link to the table of contents.
• Give the user something to look at while the page is still loading.
• Provide an informative title both at the top of the page and in the title bar of the browser window.

Why page width is critical

When reading on-screen, users have to scroll horizontally - this is time-consuming and tiring.

A page which is too wide for the printer will be clipped - most current browsers will not print the rightmost part of the page at all!

Large tables, especially if their width is fixed.

Large images - images almost always have fixed sizes.

Recommended maximum widths

Make tables and images the narrower of:

• The maximum width which will display without horizontal scrolling.
• The maximum width which will print without clipping.

Assuming the user's screen is set to 800x600 pixels, the maximum display widths are:

The maximum printable width is 648 pixels - screen resolution, resizing the browser window and additional browser panes make no difference to this.

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