Hi, what do I need to do to have my site change the screen resolution, and to adjust its self to the screen?
Im an amauture so please explain in detail
Im in the process of changing my home page and colour of the entire site, so if i need to put codes in, now would be a good time ,
Ive had people tell me that they need to scoll across (left/right) to see my site.
thanks

The site is www.CircleOfLinks.com.au

Danny

At 1024x768, I have a horizontal scrollbar on your site.

There are many methods for making liquid layouts, so giving you specific details here would be tedious at best. I suggest you do some research.. Google comes to mind.

use percentages instead of pixels in all width and height specifications in css and html.
that can make site fit any screen resolution.
the percentages for width and height should be lesser than 100%

( your site seem to have many images and may load slowly on dial up )

Danny the best approach is either to pick a minimum resolution and design for that (800x600 is still the norm) or create a liquid layout that allows the site to expand and contract with the browser window.

There are advanatges and disadvantages to both, but if this is new to you I would say to go for designing the site for the minimum resolution. You'll probably have an easier time getting the site to display the way you want and then as your skills improve you may want to give the liquid or flexible layout a try.

If you do design for an 800x600 resolution you want to keep the overall width of the page to 780px at most. I usually use 760px for a little extra saftey, but 780 should work fine. The height won't matter.

Even with experience you may opt for using the minimum resolution approach since it has it's advanatges.

how do i go about making it flexible?
i think atm my site is just fitting in at 1024x768 is that suitable?

Danny, You probably need to go the fixed size route. Reread Vangogh's post.

1024 is unacceptable. You need to make it work for 800 x 600. This means that the width for your Web page needs to be no more than 780.

Sorry, this is going to create a bit more work for you, but you really don't haev much choice. Besides it will be great experience for you to do it again.

Danny I think the flexible or liquid layout can be a good approach, but it's not going to be as simple as just one or two things. That's why I recommended trying a fixed layout first and working into the liquid layout as your skills improve.

The basic idea though in a liquid design is to use more relative measurments on your page elements. You would use % to define some widths instead of px. You don't need to make every width in % though. For example if I created a 3 column layout I might still leave the left and right columns as fixed width and allow the center column to expand using %.

There's usually more planning involved in a flexible layout as you need to make sure your layout looks good at a variety of resolutions. So while it may look great at 1024x768 it could completely fall apart at 800x600. It takes a little practice to make it work, but with a little time you can certainly get it working.

With a fixed layout I think it's still a good idea to use 800x600 as your design resolution. It's not the most popular resolution anymore, but enough people still use it that you generally want to make sure the design works at that resolution. You do need to account for the px that the browser itself uses for things like the scrollbar, which is why you should use 780px at most. Like I said I like to use 760px as a max just for an extra cushion.

Firefox has a great extension which resizes it to 800x600 or whatever size you want, so you can test how it will look in FF. It`s called 'resize' and I think it`s one of the tools in the Web Developer 1.02 extension.

Gary is right about the resize option. It's part of the Web Developer Toolbar, which you'll absolutely want if you work in Firefox, Flock, Mozilla, or SeaMonkey (That's the list of browsers it works with).

Far and away the best extension for anyone developing websites.