NEW WEBSITE LAYOUT

Curious.

I just tried clicking on "NO Style" and the page centers completely on the screen. Hardly any grey space on either side.

But, I have to click on every single page I go to to make this happen...

Curious...

And the page setup looks really weird. Text is a whole different font, like a Courier. Picture upload has 5 boxes, upload a file has two boxes, and the normal tabs in the other view appear as a "List" with just the tab headings...

Curiousity, indeed.

Ok.

Bye...

P.S.

Soon as I clicked the send button to send that previous post,the page jumped back to the "normal" view, with the off-centered post boxes and the wide grey space on the left side...

Curiousity, indeed...

Seed,
My view drop box is much different than yours. The top five or six are similar, but mine does not show most of the items on the bottom half of your box.

Thanks, but I am going to stop worrying about it, and only sign on when i have a lot of patience and tolerance for the mess it is now.

I am sorry for Terry and all the members that have to put up with this. But we all make mistakes, mabe not this big, though.

Ernie

Ernie, I just wanted to verify you were using something relatively current.

I pulled up the site in all different kind of browser formats and compatibility standards. I also tested the site for cross-browser compatibility and it came back good but was dinged for not being responsive web design. (Duh. Fixed width formats = bad.)

The only way I can get it to scroll is if the resolution on the monitor is 1024x768. A lot of older laptops, computers and monitors don't support anything higher. If yours does, you may want to increase the resolution, then use the windows settings to make your icons and text larger.

Since they keep saying they just can't figure out why some people have to scroll, I don't have faith they'll be changing anything.

I downloaded the site's stylesheet and made a couple of small modifications -- namely losing the left column, although you'd also lose the search bar and FB buttons. It needed tweaking, but the real problems were individually style elements which I couldn't control from a master file.

However, when I went to test it, I ran into a problem -- IE used to have a setting where you could apply a style to a single site. It seems that option is no longer there, and I couldn't find an add-on that does it.

Does anyone know where this option went? There's only the option to load a style sheet for all pages, and I don't think Ernie wants to lose every other site's formatting for the sake of DG!

Nicole,

I do have the Windows 7, and do not want to move up to 8, and i intend to stick with MSN because i have had better luck with their security features, but they have dropped a lot of good features to make room for some not so good improvements.

They can leave it like it is if they want to, but there is an awful lot of competition out there for the advertising they are making room for. And without a lot of viewers, that advertising will not be as profitable.

Thanks for all the good info you have offered on this problem.

Ernie

So, I thought the purpose of changing was to make the site more compatible with the different systems. But by switching to a fixed width box it makes it less compatible? Certainly seems less compatible on my computer.

This message was edited Aug 1, 2013 7:33 AM

Ernie, this has nothing to do with Windows 7 or MSN. It (I think) has to do with the resolution your monitor is set at. This site will not display properly on any screen with less than a 1280x1024 resolution.

Yes, because by setting a fixed width it won't be compatible with a whole range of modern devices like tablets and smartphones. (If you want an example of good responsive design, go to Disney.com and play with the size of your browser window. No matter what size it is, from huge to phone size, you can see the relevant content and it resizes to fit the window.)

Fixed widths went out of good practice about ten years ago. Granted a lot of existing sites are out of date or sites do it anyway because it's easier, but they generally have the decency to put the ads on the right side of the screen so it doesn't interfere with people actually, you know, using it.

The gardening population has a lot of elderly and disabled people. Assuming that your users have modern computers and don't need to use a larger resolution so they can see what's on the screen is just piss poor design.

Ok, I went to the Disney web site, it was fantastic on the home page! With my zoom at 150 and text size set to Largest the site was awesome! But then trying to be fair, I looked around awhile and realized...The entire site is just one big add! They don't have to worry about a "content" area vs. add area, all the content is ADD area! I looked for a text box of some type to compare to here, could never find any place I could actually type a message in. Still looking around some more I found this page, looks similar to what I see here on DG site on my computer(This was zoom at 100 but still with text set to Largest. Of course I saw no overlapping text areas and I did not have to scroll anywhere on the site!
I am editing this to add that I just noticed that the pale blue background is not as glaring as the white empty space here. I had rather the text be larger the empty space smaller, just saying the pale blue seemed to serve a purpose.

This message was edited Aug 1, 2013 8:10 AM

Ha ha, content is content... and most web sites are all advertising! Trust me all that content is generated on the fly using databases just like this one is. No one sits there and reprograms every time they want a new photo on the front page.

The image you posted does have a reason for having a smaller column of text in the middle. It would be really hard to read text that goes all the way across the page on a wide monitor. Our brains and eyes like line breaks when we are reading; I don't know why. In printed books that are really large (like textbooks), they often do two columns of text up and down, but with out a distinct physical page end, on web sites it's harder to do columns effectively.

Also, that's a big terms and conditions page. People would likely want to print it on letter or legal sized paper; no need to create a second "printable" view that way.

The key difference is being able to accommodate smaller widths as well as larger ones, not that you necessarily have to take up the whole space all the time.