If I can just make a pretty general comment here - certainly not aimed at anyone in particular, but the result of a few things I have noticed across many of the sites that come up through this thread......

Now it is obvious that many of you are aiming to create a professional looking site for your business or whatever, and in fact, generally speaking the sites are looking great and you are all achieving the visual effect that you desire....... BUT....... and here it comes............on many occasions your spelling/typos are letting you down!!!

Now I know that I have exactly the same problem, but when I have to prepare any kind of content........... even if it has been provided by someone else to add into the site pages........... I try to keep a dictionary close to hand when I am in doubt about how a word should be spelt. It doesn't always save my face........ but it is a good habit and in most cases I manage to avoid the worst mistakes. That goes for grammar too........... if you are unsure, try to use a turn of words that you are absolutely certain is correct, rather than go for a more complex sentence construction that might go wiry on you. So often, simple is best. I don't know about you guys, but I HATE those legal looking documents that use such high flying language I am never sure that I have understood what they are trying to tell me. I am convinced they do that on purpose!! But let's not fall into the same bad habit!!

Domain: http://www.salsasquad.com

Name: SALSA SQUAD

Description: My website to promote our uk classes and to provide a resource for people who want to learn Salsa. It includes videos of all 3 classes (see 'classes') and lots of photos.

Tools Used: CoffeeCup Photo Gallery, Video Web Wizard (sorry, didnt know about the Coffee Cup option at the time otherwise would have used it)

Authors/Team: Christian Goodrich and me.

I have recently downloaded the trial Coffee Cup and I can only get a resolution of 740x600 and that doesn't fill the window in my browser. When I look at sites that other people have posted, they fill the page. Is my problem that I am working with the free download and not the paid version?

No PDMArch, that's a problem of people believing that 800*600 is still the "popular" screen resolution. There are those that believe that all web-masters should make the sites fit that screen size, even though a vast majority of all web-surfers use 1024*768 resolution or higher... (the 740 is to account for scroll bar and program borders).

What I am trying to get at is how can I fill up the browser window. I might assume that my browser is set at 1024*768 and therefore my 740*600 resolution site doesn't fill the window, yet when I open other websites which are linked in previous posts they fill the window in my browser. How can I make mine fill the window? I don't see 1024*768 as an option in VSD.

Those sites are probably just centered in the window with the backgound color/image extending into and filling the left and right borders.

You should start a new thread for this topic if you need to know more. The people who can help may not be looking in here.

Hi PDMArch
When you start up a new site using VSD, you get a little pop up which offers several options for page width and height in the dropdown list. However, you can actually write in your own page width or height in the boxes just to the left of the dropdown list......... so let's say that about 900 - 950 is not a bad width which you can centre on the page to have just a small margin either side in the 1024 width which as Phil says is more the standard these days. Keeping just inside the standard width means that your site visitors will not usually have to scroll the page from left to right which can be pretty irritating.
You can check out the stats for resolutions and browsers on the W3C site.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

I have 'pondered' this one before myself. The best anwser I found is adding this code in using the html tool with VSD:



The url that Janys provided makes a really good point. I mean the stats show that 57% has a higher screen size(laptops) and that gives us a chance to display even more information on the page.

Phil, Cary, Janys-

Thanks for your help. Sorry I barged into this thread with my problem, but I was seeing all these websites that didn't conform to the limits I was working with and figured that
you folks would know how you got there.

Napolean,
My only warning would be that it is still wise to continue designing for the smallest standard screen, so 1024 continues to be good. Unless you know that you are designing a site destined for an intranet network where you know every screen will be a larger size. A lot of larger screens tend to be used by people with specialist interests such as gamers, art enthusiasts, photographers - or those who need to work with large spreadsheets - designers, agencies that need broad views of table contents - and not necessarily laptops. With such a high percentage using the 1024 resolution, it would be unwise to ignore that figure for a while.