I can’t exactly place why this annoys me so much, but when ever I see themes where the banner takes up a significant part of the web page, I feel like they are purposefully making me have to do more to see the rest of the content that I have come to see.
Admittedly, my theme used to have a banner that was quite high, which always bothered me (especially on my photo gallery, since it forced the user to scroll down every time the clicked on another picture). This page that I came across the other day however points out exactly what I mean. While the screen shot was taken @ 1280×1024 (minimized window since I didn’t need the width) where only the first 1/3 of the screen was the banner picture, later I viewed it at 1024×768, which almost 50% of the entire first view of the website is nothing but banner.
While beauty seems to be the reigning feature in blog themes, functionality needs to also be considered. I know it may not seem like something as simple as banner size could make a difference, but just consider the new or seasoned visitor who is browsing around your site having to scroll every time they go to another section. I’m just saying that maybe it’s worth while to be a little nice to the person actually viewing your site, just like never use the <BLINK> tag. Maybe I’m just being to picky, but I want to scroll as little as possible when browsing throughout a site. Just like mouse clicks, I only so scrolls in a life time…
Now the true question: If your site “HTML Hell?”
Update 4/12/2007 07:39
Coding Horror just had a good post about Usability. While this article was aimed more at software interfaces, I do believe that web pages / blogs should follow a lot of the same conventions. Also, mentioned in the comments of that post, is an interview with Jakob Nielsen, where he brings up some good points about web site usability and design.