EvilDragon said:
Then I checked some major newssites in Germany [...] and NONE of them reformats. They all have a fixed size which stays that big regardless of what size your browser is.
I think it depends largely on who the design company was, and whether the person calling the shots at the client company understands the web. Most designers don't cope well with the concept of dynamic designs. They make something look good when rendered in a highly-specific way, and then the web developers have to implement that design at that size. Combined with the fact that clients often don't understand the flaws in that approach, it's not surprising that many big sites are unnecessarily constrained.
A problem with dynamic sites is that to make them LOOK GOOD, the whole content has to be zoomed (pictures, text, etc.).
That's not really true. Sure, to make it look *exactly* the way you intended, you need full control over the display. But you don't ever have that on the web. And in any case, something that looks good but is unreadable is completely useless.
A good design generally has some flexibility built in, and can adapt to at least a few of the variables that are out there, without looking horrid.
But you really only need to make it look the way you want for whatever you believe the set of 'typical' browser configurations would be. Then you just need to make sure that you don't get silly broken behaviour like over-lapping text if people have significantly different set-ups -- the people with those set-ups typically won't give a damn how the site looks, just so long as the information is readable.
Hopefully that sounds like a no-brainer, but it's depressing to see the number of sites which do stupid things like putting text into fixed pixel-dimension boxes, without any apparent comprehension that larger fonts will cause it to overflow.
I'm not saying I think you should re-do the site, btw. Just discussing the topic at hand. (I would very definitely like that font fix I mentioned earlier though, please!)
Remember that you can always implement alternate style sheets if you really need to (
it's really trivial to do), and the viewer can choose the one that works best for them.
It would only work with flash - and I don't want to have any flash on the site.
Thank goodness. Excluding the millions of embedded FLVs out there, I doubt that any more than 5% of Flash on the web is remotely appropriate. Mostly it's just a pain in the arse (not to mention an accessibility nightmare).
(after loading that page, you may need to click the image, or 'View Image' with your browser, to see it full-size.)
