How best to avoid scroll bars???

[chrisnrach17]

hoping someone can advise me on this.

basically I'm going to be re-designing our company website and want to make full use of larger resolutions whilst not causing scroll bars for those on lower resolutions.

i noticed that on many websites (e.g http://www.support-it.co.uk/) the actual site itself is centered on the page and there is a coloured background which when you resize the page DOESN'T cause scrollbars to appear.

can anyone advise me on what technique I need to use to achieve the same thing? I want to use a coloured background but want to avoid it causing scrollbars to appear.

the only time scrollbars seem to appear on those sites is when you decrease the size of the window PAST the actual site content. the background seems to auto-adjust somehow.

I would also want the top menu to span the entire width of the screen - the actual menu items would stay in the same place but the actual graphics of the menu (the lines etc) I would want to span the screen.

I'd be working in Dreamweaver by the way.

thanks in advance!

[chrisnrach17]

I've been doing some more research and from what I can tell I need to use CSS to do this - is that right?

Basically the top menu graphics need to span the page - no matter what the resolution without causing scrollbars.

[htmlbasictutor]

If you use a flexible design (a.k.a liquid design), it will adjust to the size of the user's monitor. Scroll bar will not appear as long as your elements that are forced side by side or your image are not too wide.

Flexible Design (Liquid Design)

[ShawnsITSolutions]

Hello the best thing to do is use fluid design. (%) instead of fixed width.

Although the problem with this situation is if you use pixel images then depending on the resolution things can be stretched and appear out of resolution which is not good.

The best thing to do is sort of meet in the middle and do fixed width of about 800px wide that way it will be perfect 100% on 800x600 resolution while at the same time on larger resolutions it will be still within their browser and having a nice background to keep all resolutions perfect and all images clear.