Lately, there has been an advent of horizontal page designs that I’ve noticed. I even attempted to do one before a contract was cancelled. My experience with this design taught me a few things about such things.

For one thing, allow me to introduce some horizontal designs that I’ve liked. This musician’s site was the inspiration for a design which I was working on at the time through its scrolling features and whatnot. I also viewed this CSS gallery of horizontal designs while grabbing some ideas of what did and did not work for a horizontal site.

First of all, allow me to state that unless a client directly requests it, I will not create horizontal designs. In theory they aren’t difficult to create (all one needs to do is float the divs next to one another with a set width for each, and create a set width for body{}; however, many of the usability issues are difficult to navigate. For example, not every mouse is created like my Logitech and able to scroll sidways. This would make it difficult for users to scroll through the site, especially if the client wished to hide the horizontal scrolling bar.

Additionally, for single-page sites, many utilize JavaScript or jQuery in order to create the animated scrolling effect (believe me, I wrote an effect like that for a site!). While these effects are really nice on the eye, imagine if you happened to have JavaScript disabled. You would become disoriented after clicking a link, because the site will suddenly skip ahead.

I can’t honestly see the pros of having a horizontally scrolling page. While they are interesting, I don’t feel that this aesthetic honestly provides any shape or form of additional usability which could possibly make sacrificing other forms of usability debatable. While I love experimenting and feel like trying new things is the best way to go, I do not feel that creating sacrifices in the name of aesthetics is the proper way to go about this.

In addition, it stretches the page out, which I feel makes it somewhat ugly. Certainly, some of the designs which I looked at seemed elegant enough,