Logo idea and FreeBSD.com concept

[Devon H. O'Dell]

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 21:39 -0600, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 03:02:04PM -0500 I heard the voice of
> Warren Myers, and lo! it spake thus:
> > 
> > The width is directly tied to readability. If someone needs to
> > resize the window down just to read what you have to say, they will
> > most likely move on.
> 
> If someone needs to resize the window down, that's a sign that their
> window is too wide in the first place.
> 
> *I* will tell my web browser what size I want it to be, thanks.  YOU
> just give me the content that goes into it.

This topic has certainly sparked conversation between the designers
among us. I'd like to point out that I wasn't talking about the content
of the entire page; so perhaps IBM was a bad example since their page
content _never_ scales.

On that note, one person pointed out to me privately that Sun's webpage
does scale. I'm aware of this: it's simply the front page that is
statically sized.

The front page should have a static size, in my opinion, for a variety
of reasons. For such a site, your front page is more a portal to the
rest of your pages. You want to give a clear, understandable and easily
navigable layout. A static layout allows you to position the elements of
the page in a large, quickly identifiable format and to give ``front-
page style'' to your biggest news topics.

There are good arguments on each side for static versus variable widths.
My intent with the site was to create a statically-sized front page and
have real-content pages take advantage of the screen size if they can.

Sorry for the miscommunication.

--Devon