webpage too wide, horizontal scroll bar present!

[turbobits]

I've just re-launched my website with Actinic Catalog V7 and have a couple of things to sort out. One of them is that my homepage and checkout pages are too wide for the screen. The sections with products appear OK but the cart, checkout and homepage cause a horizontal scroll bar to come up. My site is:

http://www.turbobits.co.uk

Has anyone got any ideas of how to fix it please? (I'm new to Actinic so you'll have to spell it out like I'm a 12 year old)

Many Thanks
Richard

[garyhay]

DESIGN > OPTIONS look for custom properties and change the value to say 450

[jont]

Hi Richard,

depends on the size of your browser window - my desktop is set to 1024 pixels wide and did not encounter any horizontal scrolling on the homepage.

It is generally considered good design to layout to 750 pixels wide to suit all monitors - your left hand navigation is 170 pixels wide and the centre table is 600 pixels wide - let alone the padding around both. Your main logo is also 780 pixels wide.

Did you create the homepage under Actinic or yourself? If yourself then you could also probably do away with some of the nested tables used to form the main body of the homepage as this is very complex at the moment and simple cells in 1 nested table would suffice and remove the server overhead.

[turbobits]

Hello chaps,

I did everything myself. The homepage is made up of four 'fragment' pages. I haven't used any direct html in the pages and I haven't deviated from the standard template. Hence, if I want more than one image on the page I have to put one image on one fragment.

So, am I right in saying that if I want to do away with the horizontal scroll bar when a customer's monitor is set to 800x600 I need to alter the ACTSTDWIDTH variable so that the 170pixels+ACTSTDWIDTH+the padding is less than 800 pixels in total (should I aim for 750?)? How do I find out the width of the padding... or do I just go for 450 pixels for ACTSTDWIDTH and see how it looks? Do I also have to reduce my turbobits.co.uk Online Store logo down to 750pixels width too??

Many Thanks

Richard

[jont]

The logo is called turbobits_catalog_logo.jpg and is located in the /acatalog/ directory - simply open the image in an image editor and trim to suit

[jont]

The spacing around the left hand navigation is 11 pixels to the left and 15 pixels to the right (via a transparent spacer GIF)

800 pixels wide should be fine in this day and age - most people view at 1024 - but it is worth designing to 750 to ensure all can view but this does limit the layout potential for the site. It is the age old problem of design for the majority or accessibility for the minority!

If you have the knowledge it can be worthwhile designing the homepage outside of Actinic to provide you with more flexibility in the layout.

[turbobits]

Hello,
Thanks for that info. I made the turbobits catalog logo myself so cropping it or resizing it will not be a problem. One thing that is puzzling me is why I get the horizontal scroll bar on cart and checkout pages. If, from left to right, we have an 11pixel space, a 170pixel menu, a 15 pixel space and then a 600pixel wide area (ACTSTDWIDTH setting) that = 796... leaving 4 spare pixels for an 800 width. Does this mean that there is a right hand margin too? and the right hand margin is pushing the pixel width over the 800 causing the horizontal scroll bar to appear?
I haven't tried playing with ACTSTDWIDTH yet - would simply chopping it down from 600 to, say, 550 and narrowing the logo work do you think?
Regards
Richard

[garyhay]

I haven't tried playing with ACTSTDWIDTH yet - would simply chopping it down from 600 to, say, 550 and narrowing the logo work do you think?

YES it should help. I designed that template so I would hope it will.