FP 2003 SP3 - Another review please

[Malcolm Walker]

The tidying of my site at www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/ is (slowly) ongoing
.. In IE7 the new pages display centred as expected. But it in Firefox
2 the new pages are left aligned. And I cannot see what has changed to
cause this unwanted behaviour.

Can anyone tell my why? I'd be very grateful for any guidance.

 

[Steve Easton]

I'm looking at it on Both IE 7 and FF and I can't see any difference.
What do you mean by "left aligned?"

--

Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
FP Cleaner
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/fpclean.htm
Hit Me FP
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/HitMeFP.htm

 

[Malcolm Walker]

In Firefox 2 on my monitor both from the disk based and the published
Web I see the pages displayed with a narrow blank margin to the left and
a wide blank margin to the right of the screen. In IE7 the pages are
displayed in the centre of the screen with equal width blank margins on
each side.

 

[Ronx]

For the home page I get a bottom scrollbar in both browsers with the
browser opened at full screen - hard to tell if the page is centred when
it's too big for the monitor (monitor is 1024x1280 - portrait
alignment), a table 1000px wide will cause the scrollbar.

Which are the new pages? - so many to choose from.

 

[Malcolm Walker]

a table 1000px wide will cause the scrollbar.

I wonder if it is reasonable for me to assume that if your monitor was
in landscape alignment then the scrollbars would not appear?

Which are the new pages? - so many to choose from.

There are five pages that have been rebuilt to a `final' situation. As
well as the Welcome page (www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/)they are at:

www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/2007cugcteamwinners1.html
www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/card1.html
www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/bar1.html
www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/aboutthecourse1.html

Your comments, or from others, on these pages for improvements would be
much appreciated.

 

[Steve Easton]

Displayed exactly the same in mine as it did in Ronxs'.

My display is definitely "Not" landscape and the resolution is 1024 by 768
and the browser window was maximized to full screen.

--

Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
FP Cleaner
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/fpclean.htm
Hit Me FP
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/HitMeFP.htm

 

[Ronx]

On my monitor, Yes.

But consider that almost half the monitors in use are set at 1024x768
(landscape) or less resolution. Stats regarding screen resolution can be
found at http://thecounter.com or your sites statistics. Only half the
monitors (according to thecounter.com) have a width greater than 1024px.

Also many users do not open their browsers full screen - I generally
start at 800x600 and increase the size when required as far as the
monitor allows. Other users may have sidebars open (on the browser
and/or on the desktop) that restrict the maximum width of the browser
portal to less than the screen resolution would allow.

All the other pages have the same problem - too wide for most screens.
To centre the page in all browsers change this:
<div style="text-align: center" style="width: 100%"> to this:
<div style="margin:0 auto;width:1000px;>
(though 970px would be better), and change the table widths to 100%)

www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/2007cugcteamwinners1.html has a line of text
above the photo that is too long for comfortable reading. Text should
be constrained to a width of about 600-650px to make reading easy - this
is also the approximate width of a sheet of A4 paper, allowing for
margins.

The above comment also applies to
http://www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/aboutthecourse1.html

Finally, all the pages need text and background colours set. My set up
in FireFox has the defaults set to orange text on grey background, which
is how your pages appear.
--
Ron Symonds - Microsoft MVP (FrontPage)
Reply only to group - emails will be deleted unread.

http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp

 

[Malcolm Walker]

Ron, My thanks for your help - very much appreciated. I have altered my
`finished' pages as you suggested and the results appear reasonable to
me. The template I am using has also been altered to comply so I can
proceed with confidence to reconstructing the rest of the public part of
the site. HTML Tidy is reporting 0 errors and 0 warnings on almost all
of the new pages. So I perhaps I am heading in the right direction.

As the restricted Members' Area is three times the size of the public
site that can remain as is! {8;-))

I have three queries:
1. I can see where to set the page background color (I've set it to
white) in the Page Properties but where to set the text color?
2. Where in the HTML I had specified a text color does that not
supersede the browser default setting?
3. In IE7 the tables I have used on some of the pages display as
expected but in Firefox 2 the text content is spread out. Is there a
fix for this behaviour? (This didn't happen with the old pages!)

If you could answer those queries for me I'll not be back for a while!

 

[Malcolm Walker]

Steve, Thank you for your comments below and previously. I have taken
up the suggestions made by Ron and the outcome appears quite reasonable
to me.

FWIW - On the subject of page size there is an interesting thread in the
macromedia dreamweaver NG at:

Perhaps I should have taken more notice of the advice given.

 

[Ronx]

1 - Use CSS to set the text and background colours.
<style type="text/css">
body, p, td {color: black; background: white;
font-family:arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;}
</style>

The above goes immediately before </head> in Code or HTML view


2 - Yes. Specified colours will usually overrule the browser's default
settings.


3- Guesswork here - the pages are not available at time of writing this.
The table cells widths do not add up.
For example, in http://www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/opens2008.html there is a
two column table with cells that add to over 922px - the table is only
900px wide. It is possible that the new pages have cell widths that add
to less than the table width, FireFox expands these proportionately to
fill the table, whereas IE does something else.
This table also has a third cell on the last row, which may confuse some
browsers since the cells above have no colspan="2" attribute.

http://www.sandiwaygolf.co.uk/opens2008.html also has no <body> or
</body> tags.
--
Ron Symonds - Microsoft MVP (FrontPage)
Reply only to group - emails will be deleted unread.

http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp

 

[Malcolm Walker]

Thank you for all your advice - I hope I can put it to good use. I
haven't reached the opens2008 page yet but I have noted your comments.

Malcolm