?ark?lar? dinle (9)
freedo (9)
Gurgaon Property (8)
Fatmagülün Suç... (7)
Fusion Splicer (7)
Watch that Image Size
By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Previous: Cut and Paste Character Count – Avoid Long Lines of Text
Next: Popular Posts and Pages on BWI for March 2010
Doing some research for one of my clients today (a big one with 300,000+employees), I decided to check their web standards and guidelines. On the first page of their standards was the reminder to avoid templates that create horizontal scroll, and to design with 1024 pixel width in mind. Good advice. Too bad they can’t follow their advice themselves though.
Above this tech savvy advice was another example of what not to do on their intranet pages. It was this advice that inspired this post.
The advice itself was unimportant. It was how they gave it that had me chuckling. They used a screenshot to give an example, and that screenshot was 1,250 pixels wide. Being that I was on a tiny 1024 pixel laptop at that moment made me………you can guess here…….horizontal scroll to read the rest of the text.
The template itself was designed fine. Unfortunately though, it appears the content writers had no clue on what it was all about. When inserting a large picture in your site, please make sure it does not create horizontal scroll.
I usually keep a general rule of thumb; limit image width to 800 pixels, and if it’s larger, link to the image all by itself. On this site, I try to limit to just 600 pixels. Anything wider forces surrounding text to be just as wide, and that is something we just don’t want to do. See Giant Image Syndrome.
Like this post? Get usability and design tips delivered by email straight to you. Full feed articles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.
Just Posted! Variable Email Form with Mailto
Related
Category: Usability & Design Tags: horizontal scroll, images
urgh, horizontal scrolling is simply the worst! You’re right, big companies can’t take advice, even if they are paying for it! I think when people begin to get obnoxious at some stages
nice read
thanks for the share
Ruchi
I agree, it’s extremely annoying to have to scroll to see the whole image, especially in pictures where you have to constantly look at both sides constantly. All sites should have the ability to resize the pictures to the viewable area of the user’s browser/screen size.
Till then,
Jean
Horizontal scrolling is horrible for conversions. Any website that has horizontal scrolling just doesn’t seem set up properly.
I wish browsers came with the ability to do it for us instead of the sites. Like how it resizes images on blank webpages basically.
Till then,
Jean
I always make a good practice with this.
I agree, it’s extremely annoying to have to scroll to see the whole image, especially in pictures where you have to constantly look at both sides constantly
I try to keep my images less the 600×600 just in case someone has a smaller resolution, like netbooks for example i had one and some sites just get annoying.
I hope that you made them …follow through…on their own page. It is really annoying if you have these huge pictures on websites. It makes the site as well very slow.
yea and having a slow site might affect your ratings according to google’s new seo strategy to rank a site for its speed.
This is indeed true!! The slower the site the worse for the ranking. It is a factor for ranking and I think it is as well annoying for somebody. For example if I go to a website which is slow I am gone!! But fast.
I like the ability which present in some sites which resize images automatically and don’t show it verrry big because it is annoying.