Question re: Website Design & Resizing Site to Fit Browser Window?
In other words, it doesn't expand to fill the window of the monitor it's being viewed on... Is there an easy quick solution to make it scale/expand?She also said,
I'm concerned about scale-ability & the graphic headers and tool bars. They are currently in a Fireworks table and significant expansion could easily distort these images in a big time kind of way.
Making a table scaleable allows paragraphs of text to become wider or narrower to fit the space available. It does NOT distort the images in the table (by stretching them horizontally), but it might cause gaps between images, depending on how they are put together in the table. Not having seen the design, I can't guess the probability of that sort of problem or suggest the best way to fix it.
One easy thing you can do, which might satisfy your client, is to have the table centered on the screen instead of aligned to the left. This will distribute any extra white space evenly on both sides of the fixed-width design, giving an illusion of filling the screen. (The Techwhirl site displays this way.)
In addition to the issue of scaling to fit screen width, I recommend you ensure the fonts are scaleable, so people can enlarge them if they wish -- this is a major accessibility issue. Making fonts scaleable is easy: simply change any fixed font sizes in the HTML or the CSS to relative font sizes. (You may need to go into the code to do this.) However, sometimes when you do this, and a user enlarges the font, the design can get quite messed up, so after testing you might find that you need to change the overall design.
Most designs behave just fine with enlarged fonts, but a common problem is text in a fixed-height table cell; when you enlarge the font size, the bottom of the paragraph can disappear completely unless the code includes instructions to the table to enlarge the cells to fit the amount of text. Enlarging a font might also mean the user needs to scroll vertically, but believe me -- those of us who need to enlarge fonts to read the text don't mind a bit of scrolling! It's a lot better than squinting or getting out the magnifying glass.
Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
jean -at- jeanweber -dot- com
The Technical Editors' Eyrie http://www.jeanweber.com/
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