Often, clients will make the request that they don’t want to have their users scroll to view their website – they want all the content to be viewable on the screen. Unfortunately, this is most often not a realistic request. Here’s the reasons why:
- monitors are different sizes which affects the viewable window size
- a user can set a monitor to different resolutions which affects the viewable window size drastically
- some users increase the font size within their browser settings, which affects the viewable window size
- many users (unfortunately) install 1-3 toolbars on top of their browser, which eat up a significant amount of displayable ‘real estate’.
They might not like scrolling, but they will hate the alternatives!
Sometimes those reasons still aren’t enough to convince a client that this is a bad idea, so have them consider the alternatives:
- to have VERY little content – which isn’t the case for most sites. This would have to be the case for ALL pages if you care anything for consistency in your design.
- having a window scroll within a window – which defeats the purpose and makes it a very unfriendly experience, particularly for mobile devices.
- scroll horizontally, which is obviously not a natural experience for most users.