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The age old question of “why doesn't my website design fill my entire screen” has always been a bit tricky to explain.

Let's firstly start with sites that “do” fit the entire the screen. Sites that fill your entire screen actually don't adjust the size of their graphics at all. What they do instead is they allow the text content within the body of the site to expand out which then fills the screen.

An example of his is given below (take special note of the words in the 3rd column moving as the browser width is increased). (Note click on the images below to enlarge)

So what is the problem with that?

The biggest problem with sites that expand their content is that there is no set definition how text will behave. So if you have a user on a 22 or 24 inch screen (or even a 19 inch) they may end up with a line of quite long text.

So how does this affect user experience?

It's a known fact in the printing industry that columns wider then 11cm are more difficult to read because, as you read through the text, returning your eye to the next line becomes difficult (this is why newspapers are printed in columns). This is the first reason not to have “expandable content”. Also from an online perspective, as this text expands it can lead to unsightly gaps between paragraphs (around images).

To further demonstrate this, let's look at some of Australia's most popular sites:

If you take a look at all of these, they have one thing in common – fixed width design!

So the next question is, but the width of my site is less than some of these popular ones you've mentioned, what's the go?

All sites these days are fixed width design, but dependant on your content / message your site may need to be adjusted to maintain balance.

If your company designed a brochure, and there was enough room to fit it comfortably on a A4 sheet of paper, would you place this same amount of content on an A2 piece of paper? Of course you wouldn't. The same thing goes for your website design. Your design should be wide enough to fit comfortably on the width of most people's screens, whilst following good design principles.

If you have a massive amount of content to convey, then yes you should try and go the maximum accepted width, but the days of the scalable website are over (and amen to that!).