Originally Posted by
GymBeam
if there was advertising before, then something else has changed, i think the width of the user profile/avator is now wider... because now i have to scroll left-right for about an inch to read the forum.
i tried higher resolutions, with my 17" monitor, but sorry my poor eyes in my old age dont like it
You're right that the username area is a bit wider. I will see if I can shrink it some.
Could you possibly send me a screen shot of this, though? Or let me know what resolution this is? When I tested at 1024x768 I do not get a scrolling behavior.
Originally Posted by
syndr0me
The ads on the left are actually narrower than what was there before, which I believe was a summary of other stuff on the forum, in addition to the ads. The problem, as someone else mentioned, is the area for avatars seems to be wider than before. It's awfully extra wide for what it does.
I use a 30" monitor at 2560x1600. Not everybody runs their windows maximized, so there's a lot of benefit to keeping the windows smaller since you can keep more of them around without using up a bunch of space. Having a site that requires you to have the window at 1024x768 is obnoxious if there's not a good reason for it.
I personally code my sites to be as fluid as possible whenever I can, so even if there's sections that need to be a static width (like a menu or ad bar) there's a fluid section that allows the page to stretch and squish gracefully. This seems to be the best compromise most of the time.
This entire site should be fluid. It will look pretty crappy on 800x600 monitor and may have a scrollbar, because there are some fixed-width elements of the design (left hand bar, logo, banner, post box, etc). On a 1024x768 or higher, there should be no issues and there weren't in my testing, so these are bugs, not intentional design decisions. I'll be looking into this more tomorrow, it's probably just one or two spots that need to be adjusted.
edit: Ah, I okay I just went back and re-read the earlier discussion. Yea, 640x480... I am not sure what to tell you. I realize that "good design" as syndr0me mentions should handle any resolution, but there is an awful lot to fit into each page here, and 640 across (more like 600 after scrollbars and such) is not much at all. The left hand banner space is around 120, the avatar area is around 200, plus it needs to fit in the logo and banner at the top which is over 640 all in all. I can't think of a very good way to make it viewable with that, unfortunately. I'll give it a shot on my test site tomorrow though.