Explaining to boss why we need to avoid horizontal scroll

Posted by Bradley Herman on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Bradley Herman
Published on 2010-03-23T16:49:07Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 17:03 UTC
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I need help explaining to my boss why her design is poor on a clients website. She has no knowledge of web and it can be difficult as a web developer working with a woman who is a graphic designer (not even a web designer really). On a current site she has designed, an image bar "needs" to be like 1200px according to her, though it isn't necessary with the content. I'll show a quick sketch to illustrate what's going on:

http://imgur.com/MNGOT.jpg

As you see, the banner spills out past the 960px of the content and as wide as 1200px. This creates a horizontal scroll when all the content is viewable within the 960px wide viewport. I need to make this an img and not a css background because it's a jquery slideshow that fades from image to image.

I think this is a big problem because a lot of people are going to get a horizontal scroll bar imposed in their browser when they're still able to see all the relevant content. How do I help her explain it. She thinks no one will notice and it'll be fine, I think it's very bad practice and confusing to the end user.

Any help?

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