Greetings from the Railroad Tycoon Fan Station!

[RTFanStation]

Hello Everyone!

Allow me to introduce myself.
I'm Kurt, and I run the Railroad Tycoon Fan Station. (Check out the links section of the website)
I recently found out about the Hawk and Badger Railroad through a Google search, and wanted to get in touch here.
This is a great site, and again thanks to Hawk for his feedback on my site!

http://www.techtourguide.com/kurtdvich

[nedfumpkin]

Welcome aboard Kurt. I already had a look at your site, and just looked again. Looks nice except that I have to side scroll.

Feel free to include any of the extras I've created. Except Trainmaster for now since it is still in development. Locos, buildings, maps etc are free to distribute.

[Beancounter]

Hi Kurt,

Welcome aboard!

I checked out your site too, and had the same scrolling issue nedfumpkin mentioned.

BC

[WPandP]

Welcome to our happy little forum!

I see what the others are talking about. I've got a 24 inch monitor, so I wasn't anticipating any trouble with the sideways scrolling, but sure enough, the size of my browser window required a scroll. I think I found the culprit... you've got two images used as horizontal dividers, and their width is set to 1334 pixels, which is 1334 pixels further to the right of your left-hand navigation pane. In terms of the raw html, they are lines that look like this:

Code: Select all

<p align="left"><img border="0" src="horiz%20divider.png" width="1334" height="13"></p>

A quick and easy fix is to change the 1334 to some other smaller value; this will squeeze the image tighter, but you won't be able to notice that much since it's just a graphical divider (other images might look funny when you distort them like that). However, there's better ways to html code things, which might get into doing a full overhaul of your site. That is, there's other methods of producing a site that looks exactly like your site does now, but with better-written source code (that can adapt to small screens, for instance). That's where you probably have to turn to someone in the know, which would be our admin here, Hawk; he does site development professionally. If you're keen on learning for yourself, though, you can do what I've done and bookmark this site:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Pay attention to how the DIV tag works, and you'll probably start guessing at some better ways to control the page layout. But first thing I think you should do is just set that divider to some lesser width; I always aim for screens that are 800 pixels wide (some might suggest 1024px these days) which means if your left navigation pane is made up of 150px-wide images, then that leaves 650 pixels for the content to the right. That's about half the width you currently have it set at; give 650px a try for now.

Again, welcome aboard! We are all pretty friendly and like to help each other out.

[nedfumpkin]

Been a while since I wrote HTML, but I am pretty sure that you can use % for the width. Make the divider 80% rather than a fixed width.

[JSS]

Hi Kurt. Looks good to me. No scrolling required.

[proudcanadian]

[RTFanStation]

Thanks for the tips (and the welcome), guys.
I fixed the dividers to 1200 in width, so you shouldn't experience side-scrolling now.
I checked the other pages for side-scrolling, but didn't find any problems with them...so let me know if there's any more problems with the site that I'm not noticing.

Oh, and Ned, thanks for the extras. I don't have very much in terms of downloads yet, so that is much appreciated.

[Wolverine@MSU]

My display is set to 1290 x 800 and I still have to scroll (for what its worth).

[Hawk]

I'm in a hotel lobby using their guest computer with a 1440 X 900 res in IE 7 and the horizontal scroll bar is now gone. It was there yesterday on the same computer.
I won't be back home until this Sat. to see what it looks like on my computer with a 1280 X 1024 res in Firefox.

BTW! aboard.

As for site layout; I generally don't concern myself with an 800 res any more, although some sites might have a need to address visitors with an 800 res. The I'll set the content div at about 750px.
I generally build sites with a body width of 100% and give that a background, then create a content div set at about 960px and everything goes in that. Header, navigation, etc.
Sometimes I'll use a percentage but rarely, although I used to use it a lot, as I did with this web site, but that was a while back and I've changed my technique a bit since then.

[RTFanStation]

I have a 1400x900 monitor...Let me know if it should be changed.