No Time for Wii Website Development

Spending a little time checking out YouTube this morning, I came across an interesting link in their footer, YouTube on Your TV. I saw one of the methods supported was through a Wii game console. I have the Wii, so I cranked it up, and checked out my family videos. Neat, and YouTube’s site was ready to roll operating with the Opera Browser for Wii. My site however, is not.

Controlling the Content

This site is developed to be expandable, but it does have a minimum width for its main content. I did this for a couple of reasons. The first, is if someone using a 800 pixel monitor (still a few of you left) were to view my site without the minimum width setting, my main content would be pushed below the left sidebar making this site just look crazy. The second reason I did it, was to control some formatting issues when the site gets over stretched.

Having a dynamic width is important to fit most monitors, but reading content on a 20″ monitor across 1600+ pixels is way too wide. It’s best to keep column width from getting too wide so the reader can find the next new line easier. This is the reason most books and paper are less than 10″ wide.

Controlling the content like this however creates it’s own problems. With most PDA’s there is some horizontal scroll. The other issue is apparently displaying my content on a Wii. Wii uses the Opera browser, and horizontal scrolling seems to be the facts of life for many websites on the Wii. YouTube/Google apparently has the time and resources to make sure it looks good for them.

I Hate Horizontal Scroll

My site? Have fun scrolling every which way if your using Wii. I hate it! A huge pet peeve of mine is scrolling horizontally to view a website. I can accept it on a phone, but when you are scrolling horizontally on a giant flat screen it’s just not right. Will I be fixing it soon? Maybe. I’m thinking that researching Wii console detection may not be a best use of my time. What’s my potential audience gain? Me?