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From: SteveH on 16 Jan 2010 05:04
I have a friend who is launching a UK web-shopping site in conjunction
with his Irish business partners.

He's no web-design expert - but the site looks fine in Windows, but is
all laid out horizontally, about 5 screens wide on the Mac, under any
browser.

Could someone take a quick look and suggest a possible solution:

www.tidi.biz

Cheers,


--
SteveH
From: D.M. Procida on 16 Jan 2010 05:50
SteveH <italiancar(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Could someone take a quick look and suggest a possible solution:
>
> www.tidi.biz

Good grief. What on earth is responsible for creating that?

It's in a framesets; there's no earthly good reason for that.

Here's the site: <http://www.tidi.biz/>

And here's what's inside the frame: <http://shop.tidisolutions.co.uk>

What's the point of that, except to make it harder to find with search
engines and browser histories? Worse than useless.

The HTML in the latter has numerous validation errors. Until those are
fixed, all bets are off - anything could be triggering problems like
this.

The width problem seems to be related to:

<table class="Middle" summary="Layout table">

but it's hard to say.

I'm afraid it's a complete and utter mess, and I don't just mean how it
appears in a browser.

I'm sure it can all be fixed, but it does need expert help (and I mean
expert, not just quite-good-at-dabbling-help). It's the key to the
business, after all, it's worth making sure it's done right.

Daniele
From: Ben Shimmin on 16 Jan 2010 06:19
SteveH <italiancar(a)gmail.com>:
> I have a friend who is launching a UK web-shopping site in conjunction
> with his Irish business partners.
>
> He's no web-design expert - but the site looks fine in Windows, but is
> all laid out horizontally, about 5 screens wide on the Mac, under any
> browser.
>
> Could someone take a quick look and suggest a possible solution:
>
> www.tidi.biz

I was all ready to help on this, and then I took a look at the source
and changed my mind! The problem could lie anywhere in the 149KB of CSS
(or even in the 282KB of JavaScript) that accompany that page...

It stuns me how awful these off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions really are.

b.

--
<bas(a)bas.me.uk> <URL:http://bas.me.uk/>
`It is like Swinburne sat down on his soul's darkest night and designed an
organized sport.'
-- David Foster Wallace, _Infinite Jest_, on American football
From: Ian Piper on 16 Jan 2010 07:20
On 2010-01-16 10:04:27 +0000, italiancar(a)gmail.com (SteveH) said:

> I have a friend who is launching a UK web-shopping site in conjunction
> with his Irish business partners.
>
> He's no web-design expert - but the site looks fine in Windows, but is
> all laid out horizontally, about 5 screens wide on the Mac, under any
> browser.
>
> Could someone take a quick look and suggest a possible solution:
>
> www.tidi.biz
>
> Cheers,

The problem is that the site is designed by someone who does not know
much about writing website. Daniele and Ben have mentioned a couple of
issues. Here is my take on it.

1. The site should do away with the frameset altogether. There is no
good reason nowadays to build a frame-based website.
2. The front page uses a poorly-constituted mixture of divs (good) and
table-based layout (not good). Tables should not be used for layout
unless the nature of the information is inherently tabular (and this
isn't).
3. The layout is not logically designed. Good layout should take
account of accessibility.

This is not a complex design in principle and I could put together a
template-based layout that would not have any of that extra cruft. As
could any competent web page designer of course.

On the whole for web pages the simpler and more logical you can make
the layout the more likely it is that you will avoid problems of the
type your friends are seeing. Feel free to put them in touch with me
for some non-free consultancy to put it right!


Ian.
--
Ian Piper
Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development",
Apress, December 2009
Learn more here: http://learnxcodebook.com/�
--�

From: Jaimie Vandenbergh on 16 Jan 2010 09:47
On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:04:27 +0000, italiancar(a)gmail.com (SteveH)
wrote:

>I have a friend who is launching a UK web-shopping site in conjunction
>with his Irish business partners.
>
>He's no web-design expert - but the site looks fine in Windows, but is
>all laid out horizontally, about 5 screens wide on the Mac, under any
>browser.

Firefox 3.5/Mac shows it fine here. Safari does widevision.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
BANACH TARSKI is an anagram of BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI
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