Re: Which do you prefer? Why?

[Jean Hollis Weber <jean -at- jeanweber -dot- com>]

For me, http://www.editors-writers.info/stpaul5.html is the clear winner. 
It's a nice clean design, adjusts well to different window or monitor 
sizes, screen resolutions, and font sizes, and is easy to read even though 
the first page requires a lot of scrolling. I find that reading multiple 
columns onscreen is difficult. Some minor problems: the right-hand column 
is a bit wide and the margins are too large, so the text in that column has 
little space. This causes a particular problem with the indented material 
in the regular mass schedule. I also like the background pattern on the 
left-hand column and the nice strong blue-gray of the right-hand column.

I like the general layout of stpaul3.html, at least the two-column bit, but 
the margin on the right-hand side seems unnecessarily wide and the 
three-column bit ends up with very narrow columns because of that, at some 
font sizes. I would make the left-hand column a bit narrower and the 
right-hand margin quite a bit narrower. This layout gets my second-place 
vote, if the problems were cleaned up. It's a bit old-fashioned looked, but 
not excessively so, and might be suitable for the conservative image of a 
church.

I don't like stpaul.html because it's a fixed-width layout. I wonder how 
many members of the target audience might be still using 640x480 screen 
resolutions? I've been a bit startled recently to discover how many people 
still have small monitors and/or keep their screen res low for various 
reasons (including not knowing how to change them). With a fixed-width 
layout, those folks would need to scroll to see the third column.

stpaul2.html has the same problem.

stpaul4.html is better, because the page width isn't fixed, but I still 
don't like it. Because it's three columns, at a low screen res (or small 
window size) the columns get rather narrow and unsightly.

A comment on all the pages:
I congratulate you on not using fixed-sized fonts, so I could view the 
pages without a lot of hassle (I keep my fonts quite large so I can read 
them easily). However, at a large font size, the spacing in the text gets 
quite unsightly in places, because you are using full justification in most 
places (although this use is a bit inconsistent). Changing to left-aligned 
would make this look much better at any resolution.

Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
jean -at- jeanweber -dot- com
The Technical Editors' Eyrie  http://www.jeanweber.com/





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