WHO'S IN CONTROL of your web page's layout? Web surfers, like their wave riding counterparts, use different equipment and styles. Some surf your site with large monitors while others use small ones. Some surfers like making their browser windows small, others maximize them.

The point is that you can't control the size of the browser that your layout will appear in. You can, however, design accordingly.

What is resizable media. Until the Internet arrived, distributed media was a static commodity. Once a book was published the dimensions of the pages within were fixed.Web pages, on the other hand, are different. The user, AKA surfer, has control over the layout of information. The surfer has the ability to view the content of web pages in varying sized windows.

So what? Well, information is not just the sequence of letters and words, but also the messages conveyed by their spatial arrangement. So it becomes profound when a web surfer can, at a whim and often not consciously, change the size of the canvas (browser window) on which the web designer has painted. Do intended messages actually change when placed in different sized windows? Can you think of any examples of how it might?

This section talks about the tool for implementing these layout approaches 

Related EET Articles
Web Page Design: Graphic Resources for Non-Artists
Web Page Design: Navigation
Web Page Design: GIF vs. JPG

Brett Clapham
Graduate Student - Educational Technology SDSU