BellaOnline Forums Computers HTML Tables and user's monitor width

Hi Diane

I'm laying out my website using tables and I have seven columns, with the centre column being where the bulk of content sits, the far right column contains links and some limited content, far left is my navigation buttons, and the others are to create space between them.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to set the widths of these two main columns so that no users end up with horizontal scrolling (which is happening now). When I first set it up the book I was using said to put no value in the main column so that it would resize according to the user's screen size. Then later I added the right hand column and this seems to have messed up that concept.

<img src="/images/graemlins/wall.gif" alt="" />

One way to do it is to set the width to percentages instead of number of pixels. As long as the total width for all columns adds up to 100%, you should not get the horizontal scrolling.

Yes, I think that is my problem, I have used number of pixels and left the middle column "unspecified" hoping that it would shrink and stretch accordingly. I think I should really try and re-do my tables, as some of my pages I have added columns and ended up with some strange results. It's all due to not knowing what I was doing when I started and then half figuring out what to do and trying to fix things!