**I’m by myself on this Saturday night, so I’m also welcome to funny/creative/ridiculous answers!**

So I moved to Austria last year, and of course to immerse in the culture I am a regular visitor to many important websites ([orf.at](https://orf.at), [willhaben.at](https://willhaben.at), [oebb.at](https://oebb.at)). This is going to sound really weird, but I’ve noticed that most of the websites are just… narrow! I used to live in the UK and never came across this, but here so many websites just don’t fill up the width of my screen. Maybe somebody has a theory on why?

15 comments

  2. They are probably designed to be consistent even when viewed at lower resolution. You can access the orf page at 800×600 and it will look essentially the same as with 2560×1440.

  6. Depending on the contents it might be easier to read. If the details of a train connection are distributed on 50cm with a lot of space in between it’s harder to read than on 20cm with one detail next to the other. Similar for news articles where you might need to turn the head more.

  8. Simple: “The internet is just a fad and will fail so why create a modern and responsive website.”(2023) an Austrian civil servant Probably

  9. I think it is because they use the same layout for mobile devices, so they don’t need to change anything. Not very good, but… meh. It’s Austria.

  13. Narrow columns are a classic readability standard, I design my sites with that in mind too, if informative text is the focus beyond everything else. Personally, I much prefer this style to modern responsive design.

    Beyond that, this sort of design stems from large-scale investment about 15 years ago, so everything is designed with a spot in mind and reshaping it in part would require a reshape in total. Why that hasn’t been the case? Money and/or lacking necessity. They work fine, hell, they’re even popular – quick, easy to use, accessible.

    Edit: Was curious and just looked at the payload of orf.at and it was 200kb! That’s what I like to see.

  14. austrian companies dont care about their website or interface. [orf.at](https://orf.at) , probably the most renowned news station in the country, hasnt updated their website since 2000, and even the video player is the same that was used 15 years ago. They just dont give a damn.

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