Angry in the Great White North

Generally, the redesign of the website to a tab-driven design was well received. Everyone agreed that it loaded much faster than before, and I liked it because I could add content such as custom search engines by creating additional tabs, instead of loading up a single blog page with more and more stuff of interest only to some people.

The problem with the page design, however, was that for people with monitor resolutions of 800x600, or even 1024x768, the site was difficult to use. The banner and the tab menus were fixed in place, and on that resolution, they used up nearly two thirds of the vertical real estate.

Does this matter? Sure it does. These resolutions combined are hugely popular for readers of my site, according to Google Analytics. The most popular is 1024x768, with 47% of my visitors at that resolution. Next at 15% is 1280x1024, and 11% use 800x600. No one comes in lower than 800x600. The remaining 27% of my visitors are viewing the web sites at resolutions higher than 1280x1024.

So fully 58% of my visitors are coming in at resolutions under 1280x1024.

So with that number of visitors having real problems, I had to make a change. The obvious thing to do was to let everything scroll away, but I really wanted the tabs to be available at all times as a navigation aid. After much poking around, I came up with what you see here. Tabs are fixed by aligned vertically. The banner (which has been shrunk vertically as well) now scrolls away, thus allowing virtually all the vertical screen space to be used to display content. Just about everything else stays the same.

Amazingly, this was done entirely through manipulating the CSS file. Style sheets are extremely powerful, and once I decided on the layout, all I had to do was tweak the style sheet and rebuild it. The website altered dramatically in appearance and functionality in an instant. You know you are using style sheets properly when you can do things that quickly and easily.

So give this a test drive and let me know what you think. I hope that the user experience is improved for everyone, and not just the people at 1024x768 and 800x600.