Horrible isn't it?

When last have you been on a good website and you have to scroll from left to right to read text?

Never!

Because the first thing they taught us in website design is people have been conditioned to reading websites/electronic documents and pretty much any form of text from top to bottom. Not from left to right, don't fully believe me? Look on your mouse right now, does it have a scroll wheel? I'm willing to bet that it only scrolls up and down and not left and right, why would designers make the mosue like that? Because thats the standard, thats the convention.

Well this is 2010 now and some really brave "Flashy" designers want to change the way how we are conditioned with all these new futuristic designed websites adopting this type of horizontal designed website and I must add some of them have done a pretty good job in doing so, but for others I think they need a bit more work firstly a horizontal website if you decide to go that route shouldn't even be noticeable by the user they should find it so easy to use that they didn't even know it was a horizontal website.

People are so accustomed to doing things one way to get them to change is almost impossible unless it's something they have to do or depend on heavily, but in the case of many of these websites they adopt these designs to try to stand out, even urban outfitters blog tried the horizontal website (see header of this post) for sometime last year and received too many complaints from its readers till they decided it was just better to stick to what everyone knew and love.

It's better I give you a couple of examples for you to see what I'm talking about rather than just talk about it and you tell me what you think because ultimately your the end user and they make these websites not for themselves but you the users. There's just something about knowing a lot of people went to your website, it gives you that feeling of accomplishment.

Good designs:

Ego Photo - A website featuring all flash, pictures are presented and the flash it includes makes the site very interactive.

Carrot Creative - Is a Marketing Agency based in New York City and what makes their website unique is the fact that it does incorporates side scrolling but at no point will their ever be half of a word on the screen as the pages are divided up into sections and when you click a link it side scrolls so that the new section takes up the entire screen never having to worry about that annoying horizontal side scrolling bar.

Graphic Therapy - With the use of a simple navigation boxes up at the top right hand corner of your page it makes it real easy to navigate through content and this keep this theme consistent throughout all pages so you know how and where to find links.

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Bad Designs:

Oskar Kron - This guy is suppose to be a graphics designer. How sad. He's a freelance designer and this is suppose to be his website that makes clients want to do business with him.

and the worst horizontal website goes to Jason Love

This had me in tears with how horrible this design was, not speaking as a computer science major but this webmaster because his website was so "Different" he has text to remind us how to navigate his site. Lets stop right there for a second. Text to tell us how to navigate because it's that complicated but it doesn't stop there Jason Love's webmaster believed it would also help putting numbers on each section of the page like a number line so hey you should know where to scroll next. -10 to -9 and so on.

The other really bad thing about this website is that it begins in the middle, not to the extreme left so not only is this a horizontal website this is a horizontal website that's center can scroll to the left and scroll to the right, I'm not sure if any of you might like this but I just think it's horrible. Check it out for yourselves to see what I mean.

Andre S.