Page layout issues...

[Lee Roberts]

Lee,

I understand the need for ads, but I'm becoming frustrated with the amount of real estate they seem to be taking up. Here's a screen shot of the Forum Home page on my 1920 x 1080 monitor..As you can see well over 50% of the vertical space is ads or other non-content, which means a load of scrolling to get to the real content. Could we not make the width of the central ads smaller so it compresses vertically, and/or maybe even move one of them to the empty top right hand banner space?

I understand, sorry this has now been fixed. I have tested a few diffrent things and edited a number of the vB Templates over the years, every time i do a vB update there is always the issue of the templates coming up as modified and vB trys to merg them best it can. I'v also tested using diffrent vB rule sets for memebers and guests, so all in all things have been a bit messy on the back end and diffrent temples have had diffrent setup's.

What i have now done is undo any edits i made to template's and moved the ad's into the built in ad system, this stops the problem with template conflicts going forward and is the best/better way to do it. What we have now is what we will have on the new design/layout, Zone 1 and Zone 2. Zone 1 is for the large banners, so i've now combined the adsense banners and the globalspec banners into this location. Another thing going on was that i was using two diffrent servers to serve ads, this has now been condensed down into one server and its also a local one, this was somthing i needed to do to speed up page load time but could'nt because the ad platform i was using didnt have an upgrade script for the version i was using to the new one and i was stuck for awhile, looking back now i could have done somthing else and should have but at the time we had advertisers we dont have any more and i didnt want to lose their stats and so on.

I've got one little tweak to make so the ads dont show on the forum home page i hope to do that shortly, sorry i've been out with the kids most of the day so not had a chance to finish what i started yesterday.

The second issue I have is that a number of pictures don't seem to scale correctly so the 'close' box is off the screen? Scrolling right doesn't always help and you have to make the window larger but sometimes you can't make it large enough. Is this a fault of the picture poster not setting the size small enough or the forum software not scaling it to the screen size?

Not sure, the same pic opens fine on my laptop and 19" monitor never seen had this problem myself.

.Me