Re: CivicSpace site to test

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 11:12 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:36:22 -0600
> Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> > Sidebars that are common
> > to most pages and sites should be on the right.
> > 
> [snip]
> 
> Just nitpicking: ;-)
> 
> No, navigation sitebars should be on the left unless the page layout is
> either constrained to under 800 pixels or the navigation is made
> prominent with a visual clue (big, red letter or similar) or both.
> 
> People from western societies have a top-left to bottom-right eye
> movement habit, and they won't notice the navigation sidebar.

They will see it, unless the content is so wide that it
pushes the sidebar completely off the screen.  People do
not look at the top-left pixel and work their way down.
The eye looks at the page as a whole and will quickly
recognize columnated data.

Parenthical content such as navigation lists can be
easily recognized, if properly formatted.  The eye can
then ignore it and read the real content, or scan it
quickly when needed.

Now, when you have sidebars on both sides, that screws
up the brain.  Because now I don't know which side to
look on for non-content stuff.  I can't scan them as
quickly.

The reason to put the sidebars on the right is that
the left is the most prominent position (at least for
LTR languages).  With the exception of portal-style
pages (which needn't use a document-oriented layout),
people go to pages to read their content.  Thus, the
content should be in the most prominent position.

Furthermore, when content occasionally gets wide, or
when people have small screens, it's really annoying
to have to scroll every page to the right just to be
able to read the pages.

--
Shaun