Extending the Rule Of Thirds for Web Page Layouts

From the old days, when most web sites were only a bunch of text-based documents to present, where the web is a multifaceted creature in constant evolution, many designers have created their web page layouts by using only an intuitive approach. You can attribute this to the self-taught nature of the web itself, but with all the design theory available nowadays, there are no valid excuses not to learn a couple of handy principles that permit you to build harmonious, visually appealing web sites in a truly simple manner.

In this specific case, I’m talking about he Golden Proportion and the Rule of Thirds, two popular design concepts that can be easily applied to creating aesthetically pleasant web page layouts. Naturally, if you’ve been patient enough and already read all of the articles that have preceded this one, then you probably have a clear idea of how to implement these two basic principles when developing both liquid and fixed designs.

And I’m saying this because in those tutorials, I explained how to use first the Golden Proportion and then the aforementioned Rule Of Thirds, to create some typical web page layouts, such as those comprised of two and three columns respectively. However, when it comes to working with The Rule Of Thirds, there’s plenty of room to experiment and build variations of these classic layouts. It's possible not only to construct designs that include a left-placed side bar and a content area, but it’s perfectly feasible to swap out the positions of these elements very easily.

Based upon the intrinsic flexibility given by The Rule Of Thirds, in this sixth chapter of this series I’m going to demonstrate how to build a two-column web page layout whose side bar will be located to the right of the web document, thus producing an interesting variation of the design built in the previous article.

Now, it’s time to dispense with the preliminaries and continue exploring the Rule Of Thirds. Let’s jump in!