Web Page Design: Layout Control   WHO'S IN CONTROL of your web page's layout? Web surfers, like their wave riding counterparts, use different equipment and styles. Some surf your site with large monitors while others use small ones. Some surfers like making their browser windows small, others maximize them. The point is that you can't control the size of the browser that your layout will appear in. You can, however, design accordingly.

Resizable Media? What is resizable media. Until the Internet arrived, distributed media was a static commodity. Once a book was published the dimensions of the pages within were fixed.Web pages, on the other hand, are different. The user, AKA surfer, has control over the layout of information. The surfer has the ability to view the content of web pages in varying sized windows. So what? Well, information is not just the sequence of letters and words, but also the messages conveyed by their spatial arrangement. So it becomes profound when a web surfer can, at a whim and often not consciously, change the size of the canvas (browser window) on which the web designer has painted. Do intended messages actually change when placed in different sized windows? Can you think of any examples of how it might?   See For Yourself!

This block of content runs to the edge of the browser window. Why? Because it has not been instructed to confine itself to a fixed area. Resize this window and watch what happens. Watch how the spatial relationship between the words and the frog changes with the window size.

In contrast to the section above, this block of content does not run to the edge of the browser. Using a table to create a fixed the canvas, this section is restricted. Resize the window and watch how it affects the contents of this area. The area occupied by this section should remain static. As you change the window's size, watch the scroll bar at the bottom of the browser window.

Tables This section talks about the tool for implementing these layout approaches 100% Percent vs. 400 Pixels Wide   References Related EET Articles Web Page Design: Graphic Resources for Non-Artists Web Page Design: Navigation Web Page Design: GIF vs. JPG     Brett Clapham Graduate Student - Educational Technology SDSU