| ioi said:
2. Site width. As explained initially, less than 10% of users view the site at a width of less than 1280 pixels. The decision to go with 1150px meant that we could make news articles wider, same with the central pane on game pages, forum posts and so on. With the control panel width now fixed, ad widths fixed, the header and footer fixed, it is going to be very difficult to make the site narrower again. If it is just forum pages that cause problems we can try to play around with anchors so that the page automatically scrolls to the far right when you enter a thread, only covering the 160 wide ad and recent threads box on the left side. I know that probably isn't idea either and even 10% of 30k people per day will be a lot who may be unsatisfied but you have to move on at some point. I use a laptop at 1680x1050 and on most sites it seems such a total waste to have 300 pixels of black space either side that is totally unused. This is still something I am thinking about how best to tackle.
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Thanks ioi,
Anchoring to the right on forum pages would fix the biggest irritation on width for me, even if it is something I have to turn on/off myself - just so long as I don't have to scroll right everytime I page down a massive thread.
Just the one more suggestion if as it sounds we'll be keeping the wide format. It might be worth jigging the front page a bit, so that the numbers (which after all are the primary pull to the site) were fully visible on first opening to all users without scrolling. Perhaps just shifting the first column (articles) to the end would do it - plus having the numbers down the middle would break up the text blocks. Just a thought.
I'm gradually getting the hang of the rest of it!
