Fix screen overflow/left-right scrolling?

[Parangles]

Some sites, some pages, some times.... a lot of the page can only be seen by using a scroll bar on the bottom, and scrolling left and right. Other times there is no scrollbar at the bottom
and all the content width fits.
What causes this? Is it bad website design ? Browser settings?
I want to make sure this does not happen with a web site
someone is building for me. Its annoying, it slows down visitors movement around the site a lot, and it causes them to leave sooner.

[mairving]

It is bad web design or having your screen resolution set at 640x480. Most of the times I design a page at around 750pixels. This ususually helps account for vertical scrollbars, AOL and Favorites menu being opened on the left side.

[doctorgonzo]

Generally bad website design. Some websites use scripts to adjust to the user's screen resolution to account for differences. That is always an option.

Of course, if people still have 640x480 screens, there isn't much you can do about it, unless you want to design your sites that small.

[Parangles]

Just checked monitor settings on 3 PC's in the house- two older ones are 16 bit color, newest is 32 bit , all are 800x600 pixels. So I guess if I see horizontal scoll bars, its a web site problem, and not mine. Who would have 640 X 480 ? How old a PC/monitor ?

PS: What is this technically known as ? In some cases we're
talking about 1/4 " ' overflow' that causes the last word or part of a word in 12 pt. type to be cutoff. Visitors have to be working two scrollbars ... aaargh !

[doctorgonzo]

If you had a 15" monitor and/or bad eyesite, I can see why you would have 640x480. Other than that, 640x480 hasn't been common for a long time. Even 800x600 is too small, IMO. 1024x768 is nice.

[mairving]

640x480 is still the default in Windows when you install a new system. That's why some still have it at 640x480. I think that the percentages are something like this:

• 640x480 - less than 5%
• 800x600 - 45-50%
• 1024x768 - 40-45%
• Above 1024 - less than 10%

[Parangles]

I think we're in a chat room

I just changed to 1024 X768 . A site like I was talking about is now floating in the middle of my 17" screen
with about 2" of white space on the left and right sides.Its
lost a lot of visual punch and contrast, very small text size . probably could be fixed by adjustment.

[Parangles]

Mairving I don't believe those staistics. That must be for the resolution capability/specification of monitors now in use, and not the actual settings being used. Your statistics must be for
a restricted group like gamers or web designers, or artists etc
I changed to 1024 x 768 and did a quick browse of many sites.
At this setting many large popular sites appear occupying only
two thirds of the width of the page and my face is about two
inches from the screen trying to read this, with text size set to largest.
I am going to go back to 800 x 600, adjust content to fit that
on my site, and live with the overflow on other peoples sites.
Cheers.

[mairving]

Originally posted by Parangles Mairving I don't believe those staistics. That must be for the resolution capability/specification of monitors now in use, and not the actual settings being used. Your statistics must be for a restricted group like gamers or web designers, or artists etc I changed to 1024 x 768 and did a quick browse of many sites.

The stats are true. The problem is that most sites are designed for 800x600 and often don't look that great at higher resolutions. There are ways to accomodate both by backgrounds and stretching parts of the screen. A good portion of designers today design for 800x600 and that's pretty much it.

Stat links (from who knows when)
http://www.webmastermac.com/master/statistics/
http://www.dreamink.com/design5.shtml (this one is obviously a bit old since it says that 36% of the people are using Netscape)
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm
https://www.superstats.com/v3/report...7cacc701820e7f
http://www.notestips.com/80256B3A007...256C110065E470

And so on. Most of these stats come from info gathered from visitors to sites. There are javascript scripts that will give you the monitor res that visitors are using.

[Parangles]

Mairving- thanks for those useful sites- One of them admits that stats are based on visitors to his tech site, with shockwave installed. They need to only use stats for visits to sites used by the general average person. Anyway, accurate or not, you guys have my sympathy, since you have to develop/design a site to be suitable to both extremes, which reduces it to being ' Ok' on both but not 'great' on either
What we need is a browser toolbar with a ' + or - resolution ' button so viewers could quickly change to suit a particular site. One for 'cookies- off/on" too !

[mairving]

It is basically like this:
Tech Savvy people tend to use higher resolution. My computer at work uses 1280x1024. At home I use 1152x768 on mine and 1024x768 on my wife's. The reason is that people that are not tech savvy, don't really know how to change the resolution and don't understand why they would want to (after all it makes things smaller).

A little informal survey at work, tells me that the largest percentage is 800x600 followed by 1024x768 and up.

With web design you are constantly fighting the battle of making your site look good cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-resolutions and with tech savvy and non-savvy. Then you have those that have disablilities and you have something else to design for. You really have to design for the masses and have options for others. For instance, CSS is a vary valiable tool in web design. Older versions of Netscape don't support it too well. Well do you really want to make design decisions based on those few Netscape 4.7 users that you have. Probably not. It is a constant battle.