Published October 16th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Two Column Documents? Don’t Do it!
Can whoever thought a two column “magazine style” layout was a good idea for this site was a good idea please stand up? The two column layout makes the text considerably hard to read. I need to scroll vertically much more often which is an annoyance, but then I have to go back to the top of the page to read the rest of the article!
I figured that there’d be a “printer friendly” version of the page which would make lit easier to read… It took me a while to find because the option was burried at the bottom of the left hand navigation bar (not at the top of the article like most sites do), in a colour which doesn’t contrast well against its background (dark grey text on a mid grey background, yuck!). Now that I’ve found it, I’ll use that to read the article, because at least the printable version dispenses with the columns!
Two column documents? Don’t do it, it just doesn’t work for the web. Its worse than the rediculously advertisement laden, low content pages that some sites use, but don’t get me started on those.