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We heard your feedback! New View Item Page to keep "flex" design

Posted by Laurel Kline in Business News
Sunday, Aug.03.2008, 4:19 PM PT

At eBay Live we announced that we would be updating the View Item page to improve the buyer experience. Sellers and developer have spoken, and we're listening.

Good news! As a result of your feedback, we have decided to stay with the existing "flex" design and not constrain the description area to 710 pixels. You can continue to make your template as wide as you want, and the page will resize to fit it.

Note that although you are able to make your template as wide as you want to, you may find  these best practices useful:

  1. A smaller design (~800 pixels wide) allows your page to be seen properly by more users. Someone viewing your page at an 800x600 resolution (yes , approximately 10-15% of our users still use this resolution!) might still have horizontal scrollbars in their browser, even if the page itself doesn't have horizontal scrollbars. It's your  choice whether you want to support the smaller resolutions or not.   
  2. Due to a security feature we are implementing called "domain split" (if you remember, we launched this on our Motors site early this year), we recommend including a specific pixel width and height to the description/templates, instead of just setting them to "100%." This is because, the 100% setting interferes with the domain split code, and might cause some unexpected white spaces and scrollbars in the description.

We are continuing to study how buyers use the new View Item page. To check it out and learn more about the new design, visit this page: http://pages.ebay.com/newitempage/.

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Published Comments (2):

     
  1. laurel.developerrelations wrote the following on 11/18/2008 3:07:01 PM:
    Hi ssweeny, With the domain split, your template is actually hosted on a separate domain, and pulled into the View Item page with an iframe. So the width=100% means 100% of that separate page, not the View Item page. Now don't panic. This does not mean that you won't be able to use your lovely wide images. The iframe resizes to fit the width of your content. You'll get unpredictable results if you use a percentage to specify your width, and consistent results if you specify the width. See this post for examples of wide templates and how to test your own template in the Sandbox: http://developer.ebay.com/community/blog/article/?category=Blog.Developer&name=http://ebaydeveloper.typepad.com/dev/2008/09/how-the-right-r.html Let me know if you still have questions. Thanks! Laurel Kline Developer Relations
  2. ssweeney wrote the following on 11/18/2008 1:24:51 AM:
    So what is the new width constraint? When setting width to 100% or auto (which accomplishes the same thing as 100%), the listing does not extend over the entire page as would be expected by your "flex width" mention. I have developed many templates with background images extending the entire width of the screen, will these no longer work, or is the "good news" about flex width accurate and I am simply missing something?

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  • Submitted by: Laurel Kline
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