This would be a better forum if.....

[dlagrua]

Actually this forum is already quite good. Sponsored by the largest publisher of railroading magazines in the country , the site is large and chock full of good info. However, I have one idea that may improve the forum and that is appearance. I would like to see this site come up "edge to edge" on my montitor with a large grand and powerful look! . As it now stands all info is displayed in a 6 1/2" wide column in the center of my screen. This gives the site an early internet look. About 50% of the space on my monitor with this site is just blank space. So if the moderator for Kalmbach is reading this post would you kindly put this post in the sugesstion box.? You've got lots of space on the page to add considerable strength to the site. Just a suggestion from a marketing and ad man that loves your magazines.
Your comments are appreciated.

[lionelsoni]

With the "Favorites" column displayed on the left of my screen, the forum takes up most of the rest. Some of that is ads on the right; but I suspect CCT won't want to remove them.

[nblum]

Must be browser or platform specific as on my screen (Firefox/Macintosh) there are no wide bands of unoccupied territory. Just perhaps an inch on the left and on the right each. Perhaps this is what you are referring to?

[Anonymous]

Internet sites are generally designed to meet the requirements of the lowest common denominator in terms of display equipment, as well they should be. Not everyone has the largest, latest, greatest, top-of-the line monitor for viewing Web material, so a good designer will always try to come up with a happy medium that will work well enough for everyone.

[dlagrua]

My computer is not exactly a relic. It's a top end Compac, with all the bells and whistles and my display is a 17" LCD. Still I can only view a narrow 6 1/2" band at the center for all of the forum posts. Not to mention names but take a look at some of the other model RR forums and see the difference.

[Frank53]

what Allen was saying is that the format may be designed so it can equally enjoyed by folks still using 15" monitors as well as those using 21's.

[Anonymous]

That's exactly it, Frank! I'm not a web designer, but I am a web content provider--daily, as a large part of my job--and we're undergoing a web redesign at the present time, due to launch in July. A major considereation throughout the process has been how well things will read and display on small as well as large monitors, and across different browsers, operating systems, methods of Internet access, and whatever other things the web gurus need to consider. With the wide variety of different "things" out there today, it's not an easy task. We have weekly meetings to discuss requirements, processes, and design for the relatively few pages we in the News & Information division are responsible for, which doesn't include the thousands of additional web pages that the university operates through the various colleges and departments.

[Dave Farquhar]

You actually don't want to stretch text all the way across a big monitor. A line length of between 65 and 90 characters is ideal. Anything longer or shorter than that is hard to read because your eyes get fatigued. That's why a big newspaper puts its text in columns instead of running the text all the way across both pages.

This is an extremely difficult time to be doing web design because you have some people with the new widescreen monitors, and running at really high resolution on one end, and people with a 15-inch CRT monitor running at 800x600 resolution on the other end. A web designer can't afford to ignore either end. The browsers themselves are fairly stable, but when Microsoft finally releases its new operating system with Internet Explorer 7, things will go out of whack for a while, since it won't be 100% compatible with IE6, and it certainly won't be 100% compatible with Mozilla either.

Also, a forum isn't like your personal homepage where you can just load the file into an HTML editor and make changes, then upload it back and have a whole new look in a matter of minutes. A forum is a complex piece of software, taking information (in this case, user IDs and messages) in and out of databases, wrapping some HTML around it, and then displaying it. Some software makes that HTML easy to get to and change, while others don't. Comparing one magazine's forum to another isn't a fair comparison--it's running different software. So change the software, you say. Importing the messages and users into a new, different piece of software is usually non-trivial and not always possible. I ran into all of these problems when I ran a forum a few years ago. It's very easy to end up losing more than you gain.

[dlagrua]

I completely understand the point raised in this post. However, the vast majority of other forums ( no names mentioned) use a much broader display presentation and they appear to work fine on most systems.

[Poppa_Zit]

This would be a better forum if:

People stopped complaining about what they don't like. Picky, picky, picky..

Dave is right about the optimum length of a line of type for reading ease, and the complexity of the software. It represents quite an investment on Kalmbach's part.

But I can't believe some of these other comments.

Let's not forget this is a free lunch, guys. [:D]

[Dave Farquhar]

QUOTE: Originally posted by dlagrua

I completely understand the point raised in this post. However, the vast majority of other forums ( no names mentioned) use a much broader display presentation and they appear to work fine on most systems.

AND OGR is running different software. But OGR has different needs than Kalmbach does. Would the software OGR is using run on the servers Kalmbach has? Would that software import all of the content Kalmbach has? Does the software OGR is using scale well to the number of registered and concurrent users as Kalmbach has? AND if the answer to all of these questions were yes, what would it cost to do the conversion? Database administrators don't work cheap (I believe the company I work for bills out the two DBAs I work with at more than $70 an hour, and that's long-term.)

I'm just glad the forum is here and it's free, and the less it's put in harm's way, the better. Speaking as a hobbyist, rather than as an IT guy, risking the loss of the couple of years' worth of information here would be a bad thing to do. Have you ever clicked on the very oldest messages on the forum and read it backwards? There's a lot of good stuff here.

[c50truck]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it! [:D]

Bottom line, this forum is not broke!

I run a business, and folks always seem to give me free advice on how to run it better. I always wonder if they are so smart, why not put me out of business.

Rod LaFrance

[lionelsoni]

Although I was the first to disagree with his suggestion, I see no harm in dlagrua's making it, as he did very politely. I'm sure CTT wants the forum to be as useful as possible. If someone can come up with a practical improvement that they haven't thought of, why wouldn't CTT want to implement it? And why should we throw cold water on the idea of suggesting improvements, as opposed to pointing out our specific objections to the suggestions that might be made? The former is destructive, the latter, constructive.

[Poppa_Zit]

QUOTE: Originally posted by c50truck

I run a business, and folks always seem to give me free advice on how to run it better. I always wonder if they are so smart, why not put me out of business.

Rod LaFrance

I hear that, Rod.

I own a business, too, and my favorite is when we're out and people sit on their hands and wait for me to grab the check when it comes. They say, "Well, you own a business and can write it off."

They don't even know what that means. They must think the government or somebody else refills my checking account whenever the balance gets low. [(-D] [(-D]