How to make custom scroll bars...

i am in need...

[Harley_m]

Well, as the title suggests, im looking for a way to create a custom scroll bar to replace the standard horrible blue one which is clashing So badly with the rest of the site...

Any help would be very helpful...

Thanks

Harley

[Knowles]

Its css code:

body {
background : #820016;
scrollbar-face-color: #f7eeee;
scrollbar-highlight-color: #FFFFFF;
scrollbar-shadow-color: #f7eeee;
scrollbar-3dlight-color: #F5E9E9;
scrollbar-arrow-color: #800000;
scrollbar-track-color: #fbf5f5;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #cc9999;
}

Just a warning though it only works in IE, but I am sure most your taffic is IE.

[Harley_m]

its a small site selling fur producst...so its visitors will be pretty normal i should think. Thanks alot, its better that some should have nice scroll bars than none i guess...will other browsers simple resort to using the normal one...?

Thanks again...

Harley

[Knowles]

Yes the will display the default bar for that browser.

[gcross]

Scroll bars are generally controlled by the O/S, go to start, settings, control panel, display, appearance, to change those. All you need to concern yourself with, really, is whether the page colors harmonize with one another, not whether they harmonize with or clash with the colors of the browser window. That is something way beyond your ability to control.

[Harley_m]

Yes, i agree, but the site im doinf now is a classy gold and brown e-commerce site, which does not go well at all with the 'standard' blue bar at the side...thats all i wanted to try and counter...but its all done now and looks a million times better...

cheers guys for all your help

Harley

[ergophobe]

May I ask why?

I think they can look nice, agreed, but I generally dislike using them. I've spent a lot of time programming my brain to recognize the standard scrollbar. With only so many brain cells left after a mispent youth, I just find these colored scrollbars make surfing more difficult for me.

For me, it's another one of those cases where it looks cool, but ultimately I spend less time and visit fewer pages at sites with non-standard scrollbars.

Interface standardization from one app to the other was one of the *good* things from the GUI revolution. In most areas of software, the trend has been towards increasing standardization - compare old versions of WordPerfect to Word of the same era, and now compare current versions.

Why reverse this trend? Are purple scrollbars really better?

Tom

PS

'standard' blue bar

BTW, what OS has a blue scroll bar as standard? I have to admit I haven't even seen Windows XP (or Me or 98 for the most part either). In Win95/Win2K/Mac/KDE I believe the default scrollbars are usually grey, are they not?

[Knowles]

Probably a skinable browser, least thats my guess, something like neoplanet. Its just a IE browswer thats skinable.

[Harley_m]

well its a bluey purple...standard under Xp anyway... :P

Interesting what you say about non standard scroll bars, in fact i was just thinking the same researching this. i dont generally like them, but there are times when they are nessesary. That said, i am only just changing the look of the scroll bar...its not totally different, just a slight hue change so that it clashes a little less harshly. The worst crime you can commit in terms of design is having a scroll bar that blends in with the backround totally, because, as you say, it goes against what peoples brains are subconscously looking for to scroll with...

Thanks very much for the point however, its an interesting thing to remember...

Harley

[ergophobe]

worst crime you can commit in terms of design is having a scroll bar that blends in with the backround totally

Absolutely. I am increasingly coming across sites where it's only after a fair bit of looking that I realize there *is* a scrollbar and additional content. For a regular computer nerd, scrolling should be subconscious, not a challenge.

Cheers,

Tom

[tedster]

Wow! If blue/purple is standard for scrollbars on some OS, I'm going to start coding them back to gray!

[Purple Martin]

Wow! If blue/purple is standard for scrollbars on some OS, I'm going to start coding them back to gray!

I wouldn't do that if I were you tedster, I'm using XP at work so I can tell you what happens. If you leave the scrollbars at default they're lovely and curvy with a rounded 3D effect (sort of like the next/back buttons in Netscape 6 Modern theme), but if you hand-code colours they go back to boxy square flat ones like in Windows 98. Unless you really want a specific colour, leave them with the default - it blends well with the whole browser and Windows interface, after all! Flat grey ones would look out of place in an XP environment. :)

[keyplyr]

I just removed code that collored the scroll bars so that I could assure a standardized browser presentation. Your page will not validate using the IE scrollbar hack, so you cannot use a W3C Doctype (with URI) which is necessary to keep IE from rendering your page in quirks mode.

[rewboss]

I think it's best to leave the browser architecture alone. Start changing things around and you risk confusing people, or at least annoying them.

As far as I know, changing the look of the scrollbars works only on MSIE 5.5 and 6.0 in quirks mode.

[Harley_m]

Well if it goes back to standard then so be it, theres not much i can do about it, but from a design aspect my slightly modified scrollbars are miles better, and i have asked many people here and not one has said it detracts from the usabilty of the site, so im sticking with them in this situation. Though there have been a mumber of times when i wouldnt have wanted to put them on, as they wouldnt be a positive thing...

Just a case of this being one of the few times its a nice feature...

[Eric_Jarvis]

scroll bars are part of the GUI environment not part of the web page...I have a GUI environment that I have set up as I like it (first thing I do when I get on the computer is change the colours, it's like a Tom cat marking his territory, the MS blue has gone ergo this computer is now MINE)...consequently I find the changing of scroll bars feels very invasive

primitive I know, but it makes me feel uncomfortable and that isn't a good thing for a site to do

[Harley_m]

I agree with that if its the main scroll for the whole page, but on sites that have internal frames, having GUI bits stuck in the middle of your site design is intrusive, whats inside the browser window is web terratory, and while you want to harmonise everything as much as possible, i would only feel annoyed at having things changed, if the site replaced my main scroll bar....the one im talking about is only for a central frame...

[ergophobe]

....the one im talking about is only for a central frame...

Well that might be different. I still find a lot of sites where the scrollbars are hard to find (can anyone here say Flash?), but I'm not against scrollbars internal to a page being dressed up a bit. It's when they start changing the scrollbars on the sides that I get confused.

Cheers,

Tom