A short while back, I was asked by a visitor how he could create a multi-column newspaper layout for his website. Now, he was not referring to the typical multi-column website like what you see on thesitewizard.com, or what is described in my Dreamweaver, Nvu or Kompo Zer tutorials. What he wanted was a website that looked like a newspaper, where an article spanned multiple columns on every page.
Newspapers lay their pages out in multiple columns with articles spanning many columns on a single page because they are trying to optimise the space available to them. On that single page, they want to fit as many articles as they can, and still add advertisements onto that page. Newspaper pages (even tabloids) are also very wide. If every line of their articles were to span from the left hand side to the right hand side, it would be very difficult to read the article. The space wastage will also be very great, since not all lines or paragraphs will be able to span that huge width from the left margin to the right. And space is money in newspaper publishing.
Web Developer pages are a completely different medium. Provided you designed it that way, your page is as wide or narrow as your visitor wants it to be. For example, if you have a 1920x1200 monitor, and you want this article to span the entire width of the window, you can, since all of thesitewizard.com's pages use relative widths. If you prefer a narrower window, you can resize your browser, and the entire page will be automatically reformatted to fit by the browser (subject to certain limitations - you can't really resize it too small or things will go out of alignment). The point is that the too-wide problem in newspapers doesn't apply to websites. Neither does the need to squeeze as many things into every blank space as possible to save paper costs. In other words, the reasons why newspapers publishers lay their pages out in a certain way do not apply to website publishers.
Part of the problem presented by a newspaper layout is that unlike a real newspaper, which readers can spread out in order to see all columns of the article at a glance, a website can only be viewed through the narrow porthole of the monitor. This brings us to the next point.
Newspapers lay their pages out in multiple columns with articles spanning many columns on a single page because they are trying to optimise the space available to them. On that single page, they want to fit as many articles as they can, and still add advertisements onto that page. Newspaper pages (even tabloids) are also very wide. If every line of their articles were to span from the left hand side to the right hand side, it would be very difficult to read the article. The space wastage will also be very great, since not all lines or paragraphs will be able to span that huge width from the left margin to the right. And space is money in newspaper publishing.
Web Developer pages are a completely different medium. Provided you designed it that way, your page is as wide or narrow as your visitor wants it to be. For example, if you have a 1920x1200 monitor, and you want this article to span the entire width of the window, you can, since all of thesitewizard.com's pages use relative widths. If you prefer a narrower window, you can resize your browser, and the entire page will be automatically reformatted to fit by the browser (subject to certain limitations - you can't really resize it too small or things will go out of alignment). The point is that the too-wide problem in newspapers doesn't apply to websites. Neither does the need to squeeze as many things into every blank space as possible to save paper costs. In other words, the reasons why newspapers publishers lay their pages out in a certain way do not apply to website publishers.
Part of the problem presented by a newspaper layout is that unlike a real newspaper, which readers can spread out in order to see all columns of the article at a glance, a website can only be viewed through the narrow porthole of the monitor. This brings us to the next point.