i just bought dreamweaver a week ago and am reading tutorials online. i am building a new site and i was thinking between using pixeled tables as opposed to percentage tables. % tables looks very appealing since it will fill the entire screen and there won't be any 'blanks' on the left and right sides of the page for larger resolutions. but after doing some research i decide that pixeled tables would be better. my site mainly contains articles, articles and more articles. i think my readers would appreciate reading text this way: _______ _______ _______ _______ rather than having to read it this way: ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ also, in the first illustration, a short article can appear to be suffciently long. but in order for the second one to look sufficiently long, it has to be REALLY long, and i doubt anyone would want to slog through so much information on a page. so my question is...what is an appropriate width size of the table to use (not only the articles but the whole page in general)?
covered many times already in this forum, the consensus seems to be wither go % based an fill the whole screen or design for 800pixel wide screens with a table 760px to 780 px wide. People find it easier to read narrow columns of text rather than wide ones - newspapers are a good example of this, as are most bibles.
that's my point. i too would like to design it at 1024px, but statistics from another site of mine shows that roughly 45% of viewers use 800x600 (which would result in horizontal scrolling) and 45% uses 1024x768.
If you do content-heavy sites, particularly with columns, as percentages, you give the visitor the opportunity to make the lines and long or as short as each visitor desires, instead of making this decision for them.
and to the person who red repped me anonymously, if you ahve read my entire post you would have seen that i mentioned which essentially means i read up different tutorials online. and the last time i checked, this forum is, according to Shawn, so i don't see what is wrong with asking that. i just wanted to know what is the general usage of table widths. sheesh.
Most tracking utilities report monitor screen size rather than the visitors' window sizes. Were I to visit a site often, the stats would skew the mode toward 1280×960, while I seldom have my browser window at anything other than 800×600. It is a typographic convention that 60–65 characters per line is the most comfortable for reading. (A recent study suggests that within reasonable limits, wider or narrower widths do not significantly affect reading speed[1], but we're talking comfort here.) Since the average non-monospaced character averages one en in width, that suggests a main column width of about 30–32 ems. With one or two narrow side columns and font sizes ≤16px, you should be able to design for a base size to fit an 800×600 window. If you define the widths as ems, the layout will resize nicely should the visitor decide to change the font size. If you're married to DW, do not use its wysiwyg feature. It will either give you table layouts, or if you try to go css based layout, it will create a bunch of absolute position divs and position them as if you were pasting up on a print medium layup board. That may be the absolute worst way to create a web page. Use DW in plain text edit mode. Do not bother with DW preview mode. Use Firefox as your test bed. Get it right in Firefox, and check in IE in order to apply patches against its buggy behavior. My first post in a new to me forum, and it feels like a rant. Sorry about that. If I had a little positive rep in this forum, I'd rep++ you for the quality of your problem description alone. cheers, gary [1] I read that extensive paper a few months ago, realized it didn't matter, and so did not bookmark it. Sorry for the lack of reference citation.