Hi all,

 

I'm a real newbie when it comes to web design, and I'm just now working on my first complete website. I'm going to provide the client with CMS so he can edit it in the future.

 

Certain sections of my site are designed to work in a certain size, and my concern is the layout of the website will "break" if there user puts in more text than it is designed for. My question is, how do designers/developers handle this? Do you code a fall-back design, or do you let the user worry about fitting their text into the designated space?

 

Thanks,

Zach

If the content is going to be of varying sizes then you have to code those sections (and the sections directly affected by them) as flexible as you can.

A Pixel perfect design, where the container has to be rigid, just wont work in a CMS unless you impose limits to what length of content can be input.

Just give any divs or classes which contains any text a fixed width suitable for your website and have the height set to auto so it will flow up and down as text gets added/removed.

Thanks for the replies guys. I guess I could test it by intentionally overflowing each bit and providing a work around to that? Is this common practise?

As a designer you can do your best to make sure things are scalable. Try to design things that can handle both small and large amounts of data without negatively affecting the appearance or layout.

 

However, there comes a point where you can't keep your design the way it is and still be scalable, so either you change it to something less what you intended and more scalable or accept that the user will be able to break it. That point is up to you, but I've found its safer to plan for scalability even if you have to choose a solution that is second most awesome.