timjpriebe — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 19:21:34 +0000

That particular graphic would just have to be centered. You could always just make the rest of the page as wide as the graphic, though I would advise making the graphic smaller, so it could all be seen at 800x600 resolution. Maybe around 700px wide or so.

DJ Jonno — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:45:27 +0000

thanks for the advice!

this is a sample page of what i wish to achieve!

MY SITE

btw Im not very good with graphics.

dk01 — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 16:50:14 +0000

Ok there are about 5 reasons why this is a bad idea.

1. Not every browser has the same width available for use. So Internet Explorer and Firefox may have completely different numbers available.

2. With LCD's popping up everywhere you can bet that not everyone uses one of these two resolutions for their machine. For example, my buddy has a toshiba widescreen laptop. How would you handle this? I surf at 1600x1200. Would you leave me out?

3. Browsers are made to be scaled or resized. Just because you get a resolution doesn't mean that person is surfing with their web browser maximized.

4. Forking you code is bad for accessibility. By choosing certain forks you exclude a whole group of people who don't fit in exactly with your spec. This is generally frowned upon in webdesign.

5. For reasons of bandwidth you are not going to want to have a single image that is 1024 pixels wide. An image of this size as a header would take very long and would not be practical.

All this being said there are many sites that try to make give appearance that their sites are full screen. My site for example looks like the image at the top goes all the way across the screen. It does not however. I just designed my image to be a certain width (approx. 600-700px wide) and then centered it. I then used a repeating background image to make it look like the image is as wide as the browser. This means no matter how you resize the browser it will look decent. Try working something like that instead and I am positive you will be happy with the results. It can be tricky at first but is worth it in the end.

Good luck

-dk

timjpriebe — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 16:46:23 +0000

There's another problem with that. Different browsers will be slightly different widths.

Here's an example. If you have a page that does not require a scroll bar on the left side, Firefox doesn't put one there. IE, on the other hand, puts a grayed out one on there.

Not only that, but not everyone runs their browser maximized.

What I normally try to do if I want a dynamically resizing graphic at the top is to make a graphic with some area that can be repeated/tiled horizantally. Then I set that as the background, with the other graphics over it.

Does that make sense? My web design website (tandswebdesign.com) has such a header. Except two different parts of it are expandable, so it's slightly more complicated. acpsheetmetal.com is probably a more straightforward example.