Better Page Design

A co-worker forwarded a really fantastic article from Smashing Magazine, about new standards in web design. The good news is, I appear to be doing a lot of things right in my design work. Although the survey analyzed large blogs, I think the results can apply to any type of site. Here is a summary; the percentages in parentheses indicate the percentage of surveyed sites conforming to the standard:

• large blogs require a multi-column layout solution (usually 3 columns suffice) (58%);
• layouts are usually centered (94%),
• layouts usually have a fixed width (px-based) (92%),
• the width of the fixed layout varies between 951 and 1000px (56%),
• 58% of the overall site layout is used to display the main content,
• CSS-layouts are used (90%),
• the background is light, the body text is dark (98%),
• the most usual (not necessarily most user-friendly) line length lies between 80 and 100 characters,
• Verdana, Lucida Grande, Arial and Georgia are used for body text (90%),
• the font size of body text varies between 12 and 14px (78%),
• Arial and Georgia are used for headlines (52%),
• headlines have the font size between 17 and 25px.