White space has the most remarkable effect on a page’s design. It improves it immeasurably. When you are designing, make sure you allow plenty of it. When you have a lot of white space, you can include the same information (sure, the page will be longer) without creating the feeling of frenzy and chaos that permeates the Web.

White space is relaxing. White space doesn’t have to be white. If your background is pale powder blue, then your white space is really blue space.

You can use white space to draw attention to a title, a heading, or even a list. Why do you suppose a bulleted list draws your eye? White space contributes to the effect. When in doubt, use white space to break up your design.

Optimum Page Length

Forget about the idea that your entire page needs to fit into one screen without scrolling. What you really must do is to make sure what you do see looks complete. How can you tell how much will fit into a screen? Don’t assume all your visitors are running their browsers the way you are. The following section on testing walks you through all the ways you need to test your design to make sure visitors see what looks like a complete page.

More important than the page length is the page content. You don’t want to break up your content into annoyingly small bites just to have everything fit into one screen. Frames can help you maintain the sense of completeness so even if visitors have to scroll, they won’t lose their grounding.

What you want to avoid at all costs is horizontal scrolling. Do not make your visitors pan across your page to see your content. If you design your pages with a width of 550–600 pixels, you avoid this.

Future Expandability

You mean there’ll be more? Definitely. Assume your site will never go away. It will continue to grow. Paying close attention to the site architecture and site organization, as we’ll and to navigational controls takes you 80 percent of the way toward having an infinitely expandable site. Creating effective page shells and applying them with discipline takes you the rest of the way.