Text columns on website

duvet77

duvet77

duvet77

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I'd appreciate your thoughts on the following please....

I'm doing a website for someone and a couple of the pages are quite text heavy. I've split the text into two columns aiming for 50-75 characters (< 12 words) per line based on guidance I've seen on the net.

At lower screen resolutions, the columns drop off the bottom of the page so once you've read the first column you have to scroll up to start the next column. We are literally talking about 3 or 4 lines of text (at 1024 x 768) which is one flick of the scroll wheel.

I don't see it as a problem as websites require you to scroll back up to use the nav bar anyway but the person I'm doing it for is being awkward about it. I'm going to find out was res monitor he's on to make sure he is using an average size display and then maybe I'll make the text one size smaller to see if that helps. I really want to avoid long lines of text as they aren't particularly easy to read.

Any thoughts welcome!
 
I'm with your client on this one. There is a reason you don't see websites using newspaper/magazine column layouts for their main content and this is it.
I'm not a fan of overly wide sections of text, but having to scroll back up to continue reading the same article isn't that nice either. Not to mention that there are some rather stupid people out there who may not even realise that the column of text sat right beside the one they're currently reading is a continuation. (Seriously - once you do some proper user testing, you realise that things you think are blatantly obvious aren't to the average moron)
 
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hmm... I can see your point; there are a lot of morons out there!

My rationale was that I wanted to make the site as legible as possible so I went for larger than average font and short lines of text; the site is for an amateur dramatics society which seems to have oldish members and oldish customers.

I'll be doing a full width text version to show the guy - I won't call him a client because he isn't paying, I do this as a hobby, he's a friend of the family - but do you think it would be acceptable to have two columns if all the text fit on a 1024 x 768 screen with no scrolling required?

Here's a link if you want to see where it's at currently (still a lot to do).

http://cityplayers.co.uk/cityplayers/boilerplate/press_fool.html

The design is deliberately simple for the reasons above, and it's a responsive design; it goes to single column on mobile phones or if you make your browser window very narrow.
 
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Is there any reason you couldn't have a side column with some kind of related content, just to fill the space?

What you have there looks perfectly fine, but I found it awkward to read through as I naturally expect the two columns to be separate content.
(I'm not always right though and maybe some people will reply with opposing opinions)
 
I thought about the side column but the only thing I can think of would be to combine the past production photos with the press review so that you have a column of text and a column of images. It would probably be a sensible idea as all the content relating to a play is then on a single page.
 
I completely agree with Tripno. I'd remove the classes you have on the left and right columns completely to leave the text spanning the whole width. I'd also drop the text size a bit, and reduce the gap between the <p> tags.

Also, imagery helps increase the readability of a wall of text, so add anything you can to the page - whether a shot of the author or of something related to the subject.

Here's a version of your page I modified in Firebug to show what I mean:

154ael0.jpg
 
Cheers, the picture definitely helps. I'll have a look at changing it tonight.

Ps. are you spunkeymunkey (that plays MW) with a name change or are you someone else?
 
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