Hi carrie,
You are now dealing with one of the most difficult aspects of web design,
and that is the fact that a web page is viewed on a variety of machines,
having a variety of operating systems and software on them, and using a
variety of screen resolutions. There are a number of ways that people deal
with this situation, according to the tools that are available, and there
are a few of them as well.
First, you have the old tried and true method of using HTML tables for
formatting. If you put your content into tables, you can exert some control
over how the page will be laid out in different browsers. One solution is to
make the outer formatting table of a fixed width, so that it remains the
same number of pixels wide regardless of the screen resolution of the
machine. This is one of the simplest methods for controlling layout, and is
employed by such web sites as microsoft.com. In some browsers there may be
some white space to the right of the content of the page; in browsers with a
lower resolution, the content may extens beyond the edge of the browser
window, but it will remain in the same layout.
Another option is to use tables with percentages used for the size of the
table and cells. This makes the content stretch according to the size of the
browser window and/or the screen resolution of the computer. It can have
unexpected results, however, in that, while the size of the cells is
changing horizontally, the contents may change in the size of the cell
vertically.
When tables are used, typically the solution ends up being some combination
of percentages and fixed pixel widths for the various HTML table elements
(table, column, cell, row), including sometimes both height and width
settings.
Lately, the trend has been toward using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and
absolute positioning of elements in a page. This is probably the best method
for controlling layout in different browsers, but requires a great deal of
CSS expertise to do well. The complexities arise from the nesting of HTML
elements inside other HTML elements, and how absolute positioning can be
relative to the page or to the HTML element containing another HTML element.
At this time, almost all browser support CSS.
It's not going to be easy for you to master this aspect of web design, but
as David and others have stated, if you give us a URL there are plenty of
people here who can give you more specific advice and suggestions to deal
with your immmediate problem.
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.
