Horizontal site layouts

When creating sites it’s very easy to get caught in that trap of fixed width 750px layouts (guilty as charged!). There are valid reasons for this though, as these layouts offer a high level of design control and content layout while looking good on the majority of monitors. Having said that, it’s always nice to see different and original takes on website layout.

Liquid designs are popular but what you don’t see very much of is horizontal layouts, where you scroll across the page rather and down. It’s the general consensus that horizontal scrolling equals bad usability, but not every site has to be a champion of usability and sometimes the theme suits something a bit out there or challenging. So my interest was piqued when I found an interesting gallery devoted to horizontal layout sites – The Horizontal Way.

It’s got a small collection of good looking and unorthodox horizontal layout sites. My favourite has to be Flight to a Floating Horizon, an ultra wide landscape “picture book”. Very pretty.