Our contained designs usually have a rectangular visual border to frame the content. Most flash and contemporary looking sites are fully contained. The advantage of contained sites is that they look elegant, and they will look the same way in all browsers and do not depend on browser window size. 

It may seem like you can't fit a lot of content into a contained design, but we have found a variety of ways of having a lot of content fit in a small space. These include using iframes, thumbnails and blowups, pop up windows, DHTML javascript scrollers, flash, creative cropping and layout, splitting content up into several pages, smaller fonts, and concise content.

Vertical stretching often uses a repeated image in the background to appear as if the content box is stretching; most of the time the images themselves don’t actually ‘stretch’. The drop shadow behind this content box uses this repeated image to “stretch” to the bottom of this content:

Often vertical stretch designs have a fixed width, like this content box has: the designer doesn’t care how tall the box is, but does care how wide it is.

While a similar horizontal stretch technique is used frequently to stretch elements to a full width of a page, such as the top blue bar of this page, a fixed vertical and variable width content box technique is rarely employed on the web, probably because it would be hard to read.

Flash is great for video, sound, and games. It’s, well, flashy, and can add appeal, fun, and ‘eye candy’ to your site. Poorly done though, flash sites can take forever to download, be hard to navigate, and otherwise be annoying. The animation on the home page of this site was done in flash.