Xlobby Website Redesign?

by **tswhite70** on Tue Mar 20, 2007 3:49 pm

Ok, I've been biting my tongue, but it's really bugging me. I like the new Xlobby website look, it's pretty and all. But, I HATE the fact that it's configured for 760 width. In this day and age of widescreen monitors I really can't stand seeing almost 1/2 of my screen real estate wasted...

thoughts?

tsw

by **dalanik** on Tue Mar 20, 2007 4:00 pm

by **cmhardwick** on Tue Mar 20, 2007 5:11 pm

and it blows out to each side and looks bad if there's a screnshot or code or anything in the forum that's wider than that.

by **stevenhanna6** on Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:12 am

yah I know about the forum sides going crazy sometimes, I just know I will be upgrading the forum soon I can't spend to much time looking for that table bug. Once the new forum is ready we will be able to do attachements so screenshots will get resized for a thumbnail preview.

Is everyones issue with the hardcoded size have to do just with the forum? maybe I can just let the forum be 100% width of the browser window when I upgrade it later on.

by **tswhite70** on Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:55 pm

Personally, it bugs me everywhere (although certainly on the forum it should not be fixed width). The site is definitely vertically oriented right now, of course at 760 you don't have much choice. It would be nice if you could switch to a percentage instead of the fixed width.

Having done website design in the past, I certainly understand how difficult it can be to design something that looks good at all resolutions and all browsers - you can never make it perfect. But current stats do show that a overwhelming majority (81%) of browsers are running at 1024x768 or higher (http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm). Here's an article by Jacob Nielsen from last year along the same lines (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html).

FWIW - I'm running 1152x864 at work (17in CRT) and 1280x720 at home (17in CRT, 26/32/61in LCD/DLP).

I'm sure you and Wes have more important things to think about than website layout right now, but I couldn't bite my tongue any longer

thanks,
tsw

by **P3rv3rt B3ar** on Thu Mar 22, 2007 5:20 pm

I think u forget that many people are using this with cellphones and other mobile devices too... and i dont believe that too many of these users have considerably wider horizontal resolution than 760.

In my Nokia 9500 with 800 pixels of horizontal resolution current size is just perfect. But on the otherhand its browser rescales everything anyway to fit on width (which work perfect unless page uses frames) so i dont believe id have problem even with bigger fixed resolution... My point is just your asumption about huge screens on this mobile era aint valid. That said, i agree with u in that it should be percentage instead of fixed value.

Please dont quote that Nielsen clown... Im having flashbacks from HCI classes and i feel sick already...

In my point of view information systems would be perfect if we could eliminate users altogether

by **tswhite70** on Thu Mar 22, 2007 7:27 pm

I didn't forget about mobile devices, if Steve & Wes think it's important they should certainly include a mobile device specific CSS on the pages. But I'll hazard to guess that your "many" mobile users equates to less than 1% of the traffic to Xlobby.com. That's not to say that this won't change over the next 3-7 years, but so will the physcial nature of the mobile devices (ie screen resolution and orientation). Now good old XP defaulted to 800x600 on install, so you could almost convince me with an argument that most users are using XP and most don't change from the default res. Of course the stats don't support that, but whatever. Vista btw, gets rid of the old XP default and provides default resolution based on the discovered monitor size (15" 1024x768, 17-19" 1280x1024, 20+" 1600x1200).

And I didn't make an assumption about "huge" screens, my two primary monitors are 17" crts - certainly not huge by any stretch of the imagination. I backed up my comments with real statistics so I can't imagine how you "assume" that I'm way off base and pulling stuff out of thin air.

My orignal comment was actually "widescreen monitors", or maybe more to the point I guess, widescreen resolutions. Mobile devices, along with laptops & desktop monitors, and our home theater/tv displays are headed this direction due to content and I don't see any change in that trend. So for me, designing for a horizontal/widescreen orientation makes a lot of sense.

Ultimately it's up to Steven and Wes to determine who their target audience is and how they wan't to design the site.

tsw

Ps: Nielsen a clown? whatever...