Topic: Advice on alternative to scrolling

[Dawnblade]

Hello,

I have been working on a website (my first one) that includes articles to help people learn music theory and related topics. Although the articles can get kind of long, I was hoping to keep the scrolling to a minimal. Currently, I have been using the asp ajax toolkit accordion feature to accomplish this. I like the look and the feel of it, but I don't know if that is the best solution. Having to click on the headers to open up the article is not as smooth as scrolling down.

I'm trying to avoid scrolling to keep all the navigation buttons and the rest of the layout of the website always present. But perhaps it is not a big deal.

here is one of the pages where I'm using the accordion maestrotheory.net

Is it possible to create the accordion effect with php? Would any of you recommend something else to avoid scrolling or even just accept it and embrace it?

I appreciate the help

[lieqie]

Set webpage height to fixed 100%.

[Dawnblade]

I am sorry, my communication skills must have failed me again. That is what I get for posting at work.

I am not tried to prevent the user from scrolling. I am looking for ways to minimize the need for it. Granted different screen size and resolutions will allow for different amounts of  text to be viewed without scrolling. I'm looking for ways to keep as much of the text of the articles within the main layout of the screen where the boxes are. So someone reading the text will be able to read most of the text without needing to move around the screen as much.

Then again, scrolling is more commonly used and more intuitive perhaps than introducing some different approach which could confuse the reader and perhaps cause them to miss some of the content. Any thoughts?

Did that make sense?

[cags]

It would depend on the layout of your site. If you have an elastic width layout you can be sure you are using as much screen 'real estate' as is possible. Since the content of any side columns is likely menus you can set those columns to fixed width and set the centre column to expand, this way you always have a site that is using 100% of the screen.

[Dawnblade]

You mean have the middle content div expand over the side ones? I am not sure that I understand what you mean. Wouldn't that cover the side divs (one which is navigation and the other ads)?

[dannyluked]

Hi,
I looked at your site and cant find a way of fixing your problem however, you dont want users to need to scroll to read an article but on my netbook I have to scroll left and right to see the whole page! I would focus on making the page fit a screen that has a width of 1024! Maybe add a button to make the page smaller?

[thewooleymammoth]

your site is down, you could just set the div with the article in it to

css
overflow: auto;

then only the article would scroll and your navigation stuff would always be there