Making my site fit for 960 and 1240px

Hi,

This is probably a newbie question but somehow today I cannot figure it out. I got a forum like this one, and its 960px width. All good but now I want to add a sidebar with about 400 pixels. For most people that view with 1280 resolution, this is no issue. The forum can go a bit smaller, and I can easily add the sidebar. However with width 960 the forum would only have 560 left and thats too small so for those people I want to leave the sidebar.

I can make a floating div that only shows if the resolution is 1280 or higher, but that would mean that this code is in the source code at smaller sizes as well, just not visible. Those 'invisible links' probably get frowned upon by Google?

What would be the right thing to do here?

 

The right thing to do here is to not think in fixed widths in the first place; it's a miserable steaming /FAIL/ at web design no matter what the artsy-fartsy types and lazy coders will tell you. You fixed the width, now you have a problem -- I'm shocked.

Your 960 being too big for my netbook, and a crappy little stripe on my desktop. If you are even thinking "for people with 1280 resolution" you've COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT of HTML, CSS and the Internet as a whole. If you had designed fluid or at the very least semi-fluid, you could add your side column (preferably in a size that automatically scales like EM -- just like your fonts should be) and everything would auto-adjust to fit it.

Though a 400px sidebar on a forums? REALLY?!? Sounds like something I'd target with user.css to say display:none; to as it sounds like something that has no business on the forums, regardless of screen size. Maybe use media queries to make it smaller for smaller displays?

Though without seeing the site in question, anything we tell you is a wild guess.

 

a 400px sidebar allows me at least a rectangle, if thats what u are guessing, you are right. It also allows me to add some functions, like last 10 questions, a searchbar, login option, or about this forum box.

Fluid sounds very nice, and is definately something I can go for after I got a preview of how it looks on 960 and 1240 in Photoshop. First I got to get an idea how it looks on most used screens, before I will actually build it. If it looks terrible with a sidebar of 400 pix on a screen with a resolution of 1280 (or maybe even 1024) width I guess I have to forget that option?

 

good information...thanks

 

As mentioned above, think fluid - use percentages. You could also make it responsive (which normally works best with fluid layouts anyway).