A fairly new design that has been making its way around, is the horizontal layout. Although gaining popularity, you haven’t seen it on any of your major websites. A horizontal layout is one where you scroll through a website left to right, rather than scrolling down to read more information. The Urban Outfitters blog is a great example of this.

Once you get the hang of using the website, it’s not all that bad — it makes sense. But that’s the catch, people have to figure out how to navigate your website, and with the amount of information that we have at our finger tips, I don’t know if we have the time to learn a new way to browse a website.

The last thing you want your visitors to do is think, especially when looking for information on your website. The ultimate goal is allowing your visitors to find the information they are looking for without a battle. Once they become challenged, they may leave and never return.

One thing is for certain, once you browse a horizontal site it does feel natural. Everything we read is left to right so it makes sense. It is a step that your competitors most likely aren’t making, but then again — there might be a reason for that.

What do you think?