Page Layout

Most computers have landscape-style screens, wider than they are tall.  Chess.com's layout is portrait-style and doesn't fit properly.  It annoys me that half of the stuff I want to see is out of sight, but I have two huge empty panels on either side of the page.  Competitor sites appear to have arranged their layout more appropriately.

I don't think it's a browser issue.  When I run in full screen mode I have large areas of dead-space (grey background) on both the left and the right of my screen due to my landscape style monitor as well.  The problem likely comes from the use of static width objects that are tuned to work for the lowest common denominator amongst all of the user's screen resolutions.  Building the layout so that it adjusts to your resolution is probably somewhat more challenging.

Looking through some of the other pages I have open, I see exactly the same issue:  Facebook, Howstuffworks and another informational forum hosted by Amazon all make poor use of the available margins.  In fact, the only exception is Google news.

can you post a screenshot please?

I'm pretty sure he's just saying that the page design allows for older displays that don't necessarily have 'wide-screen' aspects.  In other words, you could still use chess.com at 800x600.  I think the request is for something more "horizontal" (and less accessible).

My monitor is "widescreen" (I didn't choose it, it just happened that way) and refuses to run in 800x600 mode.  I have to do weird things to get the Google Earth ball to be a ball rather than an oval.  I'm using Firefox at 110% zoom because I have elderly eyes, unfortunately something I can't do much about.  I can barely read this text as it is.

If I'm allowed to name names, GameKnot is the same width but puts all the relevant stuff in the visible part of the screen, with the lesser material below.  RedHotPawn does the same, and its page is closer to square so there is less wasted space at the sides.  Both of them tint the extra space so that it isn't quite as obtrusive as it is here.

Well, I think my monitor is probably similar to yours - but I can see all the 'good stuff' without scrolling most of the time - certainly when I'm playing chess.

Keep in mind, you can make the background (the "extra space") any colour you like from here, if that helps at all:

http://www.chess.com/home/edit_theme.html

Thank you for that suggestion, I've adopted a theme which gets rid of the dark grey panels.  I've also started using F11 to get that little bit of extra height.  Now I'm happy!

all to complicated for my brain,but sounds interesting, seya