I’ve just made a small change to motorcyclesurvey.com, to see if applying a CSS max-width to large block of text content improves the visitor experience, by keeping the line lengths from becoming too long.
Internet Explorer 5 & 6 users won’t see the change (max-width isn’t supported in those browsers), and nor will most users of small monitors, but hopefully restricting the text content to a width of 33ems (ems being used so the max-width scales with font size), with auto left and right margins, will make the reading experience more pleasant for visitors.
As usual, if this change seems to be positive, I’ll roll out the change to the car and mobile phone sites.
As an aside, for tracking the effect of small changes like these, I’m finding the Google Analytics Pages/Visit figures very useful.
Having tried this for almost a week, it seemed reduce the Pages/Visit figure, suggesting that visitors didn’t enjoy the loss of flexibility (especially those with larger screens). So I’ve just reverted to the old layout, and won’t be implementing similar changes on my other sites.