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don't hide anything from the people who don't want to.<br />
Please, No Horizontal Scrolling!<br />
Whatever you do, though, keep your scrolling vertical. Left-to-right scrolling<br />
on the web is an absolute abomination. Users aren't expecting it, mouse<br />
wheels can't do it, and web browsers aren't designed for it. In short, it is a<br />
very, very bad idea. Every so often some designer will come along and try to<br />
make it work, thinking they're being edgy and innovative (after all, no-one<br />
else is doing it), only to produce a completely terrible website. In the history<br />
of the web so far, there has never been a good horizontally scrolling website,<br />
and you're not going to be the designer who produces one.<br />
Keep Flash Away from Scroll Bars.<br />
Another common design mistake when it comes to scroll bars is to think that<br />
you can do it better than the web browser, and use Flash to create<br />
non-standard scroll bars. While you might like the look you create, it will<br />
inevitably be less useful to your visitors than a normal scroll bar would have<br />
been.<br />
Your scroll bar won't be immediately recognisable as what it is. It's unlikely<br />
to work with mouse wheels or keyboard shortcuts, and you probably won't<br />
even let users scroll by clicking in exactly the way they want. You end up<br />
designing a scroll bar that's ideal for you, but frustrating for everyone else.<br />
However ugly you might think the default scroll bars are, people know how<br />
they work, and they're used to them – they don't want to learn something<br />
new just to use your website.<br />
Scroll Bars are Better than New Pages.<br />
No matter how down you are on scroll bars, it's always a bad idea to replace<br />
them with pagination. An article can easily become three or four pages long<br />
with the user having to click a 'next' button to get from one page to the next,<br />
and that's just unacceptable on the web – especially since, on smaller<br />
screens, some scrolling will be required anyway. If you think users dislike<br />
scrolling, then you have to realize that they dislike waiting for new pages to<br />
load even more: if your site requires them to wait for more than a few<br />
seconds between pages, they'll abandon articles even if they're in the middle<br />
of reading them.<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |114
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