This is not abnormal. If you run high resolution, you will often see this.
Web designers who stick to recommended practices design their pages so that
they will display properly in 800×600 resolution. It is not unoften that
you will see lots of empty space at a site if you run resolution higher than
that. When a web designer creates a page, he has the option of using a
fixed width, or a percentage-based width. So, if I create a page that has a
table of information, I can tell that table to be 760 pixels wide, which
would leave lots of empty space in higher resolution, or I can specify that
the table is 100% width, which would fill the browser window regardless of
size. I'd say the majority of competent web designers use fixed width,
being fully aware that there will be lots of empty space on the screen for
people who are running higher resolution. This is just the way things have
to be though. Some people design for 1024×768. Some people don't even
think about resolution.
If your end user doesn't like it, set his resolution to 800×600 and see how
quickly he decides he doesn't mind the empty space on those sites.
Ray at work
alex said:
Have a user at a remote location. Only MSN's home page and Dell's home
pages are not displaying correctly on his PC, all others are. He knows how
to use the buttons on the monitor to change/move the screen's size and
position but that is not the problem. He knows about Display settings,
resolutions, etc., which aren't the problem either. It seems only these two
home pages on the internet are displaying incorrectly. The whole page is
there, instead of 15 inches wide, it is displaying 10 inches, everything is
condensed and surrounded by MSN color blue; 1/3 of the whole screen is
"gone".
