You haven't set a font size on your home page so the browser uses whatever
is the default on the computer used to visit the site. This is actually a
good thing because it means that everyone can view your site. If you
restrict font sizes to what looks good on your monitor it may not be
readable on mine at 1400x1050.
Monitor resolutions are getting higher all the time. On a 15" screen which
is the physical size of my laptop if you using its default resolution of
1400x1050 (optimized for that size and changing it to a lower resolution
actually makes it harder to read because the text loses its crispness and
becomes fuzzy) there are almost twice as many px as on a 15" crt with an
800x600 resolution. I expect this is the pheonmenon you are experiencing.
You laptop has a higher resoltuion than your desktop so the text on your
laptop is smaller. If you change it so that it is smaller on your desktop it
is likely to be illegible on your laptop. It would also be illegible on a
Mac since with fixed font sizes they can display as much s 25% smaller than
on a PC with the same size/resolution monitor.
Restricting the size of your layout to a fixed width will do nothing to
change this behavior. It will simply make the page have white space on each
side instead of growing/shrinking to match the browser window.
Personally I see nothing wrong with the way your site looks or works on my
laptop other than the scrollbars that appear if the browse is less than
850px wide. You might want to reduce the size of the flash or other image so
that the total minimum width is 840px or less if you don't want most
visitors to have scollbars (I'm talking about the internal pages here such
as tuition.html). I'm not a fan of Flash intros but that's a personal
opinion and you do provide the equivilent of a 'skip intro' link by
allowing people to enter the home page immediately using the enter link
Other comments, I find the blue text on the white background to be hard to
read due to insufficient contrast. On your contact us page, take out the
space between contact & us, some browsers and servers have a problem with
spaces. Even if yours doesn't it is a bad idea to use them in file names due
to comaptibility issues. Change it to contactus.htm or if you want the
appearance of space for legibility contact_us.htm. Also on that page, I
can't read the white text on the blue background with the phone number an
demail address. The font is too light weight and too small (font-size:
10.0pt) to read on my monitor. Pts are very inconsistent in display size and
can be as much as 20-25% larger in IE than in other browsers or on other
computer systems such as Macs.