This afternoon I installed several web site updates that have been long in the works, and which affect the entire site.
One of the most important changes affects every page. It is an improvement in the way the site handles a situation where you are viewing it on a widescreen monitor or tablet, and the browser is maximized to the full size of the screen.
Previously, the site would simply expand to the full size of the screen, making the center content section extremely wide -- and highly unreadable. The site is definitely not designed for a huge width like that, and in addition to becoming unreadable, it also became cumbersome to navigate to various pages when it was made too wide.
Without making adjustments, this problem would have become exacerbated when Windows 8 comes out, because its "Metro" browser always takes up the full size of the screen, so the site would always be very unreadable and unusable.
So I changed the layout of the pages to impose a "maximum width" for each page. If the web browser expands to a size larger than the maximum width, the site stays in the middle of the page, with the sides showing a new textured background.
I tried to keep a pretty wide maximum width, so that people who like seeing the site wider would not feel too restricted, while hopefully not compromising readability and usability by making it too wide.
However, the site continues to work well on narrower screens too, as its ability to automatically "shrink down" to fit narrow screens has not changed.
Imposing a fixed width on a web site is extremely common these days. In fact, fixed-width sites are the most common type. For example, if you go to the New York Times site, you will see that even if you make your browser wider or narrower, the site itself never changes its width. Most sites work that way.
So I did want to take to good parts from such a design, while still providing the better functionality that Lottery Post has always had -- the ability to automatically grow and shrink as you expand and shrink your browser window.
One important thing to note is that although I did a lot of testing, it is possible that a bug or two may have slipped through. It is very complex to change the format of the site, since it impacts the positioning of everything you see. Not just the page contents, but menus, popup menus, popup windows, moving/sliding things, and more. It's impossible for me to personally test the million+ pages of Lottery Post using every device under the sun, so I'm going to rely on all of you to report any problems to me that you may find. I really appreciate it.
In the future I may do some things to take advantage of the extra space opened up on the sides when displayed with a widescreen monitor. For example, some sites are programmed to look for the extra space, and if it's there some non-essential page items are move from the page into the extra space on the sides. For instance they might move the social media icons into the extra space. I haven't made any decisions yet, because I'd like to live with the new layout for a while.
Anyway, there are a few more updates that I installed today, in addition to the site layout changes:
- Patched the text editor to the latest release, which fixes an annoying bug with all IE browsers that sometimes deleted an entire paragraph when the Backspace key was pressed.
- Updated mobile/tablet device detection to latest release so that the site is displayed properly for the latest mobile devices and tablets.
- Applied more fixes to the popup windows to solve a problem with IE8 and lower browsers, where the browser would popup the window in the wrong place, and you'd just see a blackened (dimmed) page.
- Adjusted the popup window positioning and behavior for the Event Calendar.
- Fixed display of Systems page on mobile devices.
- Other minor bug fixes and performance enhancements.
As always, these changes are also documented on the Change Log page.
If you have any feedback you'd like to share, including any criticisms, feel free to leave a comment.