eBay Template Tips: Making HTML tables work with eBay
One of the most common problems in web design is the ability to make things fall as they should instead of as they may. This is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to design work. Most software, dreamweaver, front page, and others insert some nasty code in places where it might make sense if it were a perfect world but web designers know we don’t want that. Structuring a table to go 100% width can be accomplished easily enough, but sometimes things get out of kilter. First of all your code will adjust itself quite often for the size of your monitor and if you are liking a huge monitor with 1200 resolution you’re in trouble. You’ll want to design for the lowest denominator, and currently that is about 800 wide. But you wont’ want to make a table 800 wide and then have it look like a little dwarf in the middle of a forest. You’ll want the perception to keep rolling outward no matter how big your visitor has his resoltuion set.
The best way to accomplish this is through the use of a table set to 100% width. You’ll want each of the columns inside this table to be set at percentages and not at acutal width. If you see some code that says width=”638″ you’ll know you might be in for trouble. Usually its a single cell that is doing the messing up, this is where you’ll want to go in and reset it for width=”40%” or something like that. You might have to do the dreaded and actually read the code you are putting in but basically what you are looking for is something like this:
table width=”100%” border=”0″
tr
td width=”645″> /td
td width=”600″> /td
/tr
/table
The td width is set to pixels while the table is set to 100% so no matter how you cut it, if you’re using something like dreamweaver, it will keep shifting around making the table all distorted. The correct code for this table would be something more like this:
table width=”100%” border=”0″
tr
td width=”50%” /td
td width=”50%” /td
/tr
/table
Remember to start your tables out as percentage tables and you’ll have a less likely chance to run into this problem.