Hi Dale,

First, this site looks MUCH better than your original site! Congratulations!!

Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to give you much of an in depth analysis but I have a couple of suggestions:

• Set a maximum width for your pages. You can pick your width, but I suggest something between about 1000 and 1400 pixels.
• Make your site name an image instead of text. You want to control how it looks and how lines break. Personally, I dislike having links in a banner have an "on hover" event.
• Look at your site in a window that's only 1024px wide. (Firefox has a Web Developer Toolbar that has a resize function that makes this easy.) You'll find that your login block overlays page content--NOT GOOD.

I'll try to take a closer look some other time.

Blessings,
Curt

Curt, thanks. I noticed the tab overlap and was trying to figure out what to do about that. A set width did the trick.

With all due respect, Paul, your width is still to wide.

Site visitors tolerate vertical scrolling very well and, I believe, the vast number of sites are designed to be viewed requiring the user to scroll vertically. By the same token, site visitors generally dislike horizontal scrolling.

I'm guessing that you use a pretty wide (measured in pixels) monitor; I do too. We tend to get spoiled by these displays and, incorrectly, assume that the world looks at our sites using similar displays. Unfortunately, that's not the case and a good percentage of site visitors will be using older monitors, e.g., the 4:3 aspect ratio 1024*768 which seems to be pretty common. A challenge in designing a website is to make something that avoids horizontal scrolling while retaining a good look on wider monitors.

In the past we used to design sites to work on 800*600 monitors. Fortunately, those have all but completely disappeared. Displays with 1024*768 resolution are still very common and that's the size I, and many others, I believe, use. This doesn't mean that we have to use a fixed width, we can still use more space if it's there (using min-width and max-width specifications).

There are potential problems if we let our page get too wide. The first of these is the tendency for shorter paragraphs to become very wide and short which looks bad. Larger, very wide paragraphs may be difficult to read because it's hard to follow long lines. Another problem we see in poorly designed fluid layouts is the "rivers of white" syndrome.

The Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox has a very useful resize tool that I use frequently to see my sites as others see them (well, physically anyway :)). While discussing Firefox I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Firebug; I'd be lost without it.

I hope this helps; blessings,
Curt

Yeah, I've tried shrinking the main field unsuccessfully. I'm editing an existing template and know little about css. The right columns have to be the size they are. Not sure how to edit it without something going wrong.