I need help explaining to my boss why her design is poor on a client’s website. She has no knowledge of the 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 ~1200px according to her, though it isn’t necessary with the content. A quick sketch to illustrate what’s going on:
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. She thinks no one will notice and it’ll be fine; I think it’s very bad practice and confusing to the end user.
How do I explain the problem to her?
Ask her if she would want to open a brochure to only see that one of the folds was unnecessary as it merely has some header image spilling over into it (but no content).