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Before, I aimed at visitors with 800x600 resoluton.
Is it the time yet to move the standard up a bit ?
Does that have an impact on how you set up the site? I suspect it is one of the questions you need to address when deciding the formatting and layout of the design.
Yikes, we just gave up on 640 x 480 about 5-6 months ago when all our client's stats showed that percentage down in the low single digits.
I guess it depends, as most have suggested, on your audience and what they're using.
All of this means that there isn't in reality a choise to be made. There are 2 ways of designing a site to work with most computers... either liquid design (what I would recomend), or fixed at 760 odd pixles or less. The (very few) sites I come across fixed at 1000 odd pixles across are really annoying.
Liquid sites print off very well indeed.
I ran some tests a year or so back on printing fixed width sites on Netscape 4.7 and IE5. With standard browser margin settings on an HP Deskjet 895 the maximum width was 646 pixels. Any higher and you'd start to lose the right hand side of the page. Liquid layouts need to be liquid down to this kind of size to print okay.
No, not for me :) I love 100% width deisgns that start to look so at 800x600.
After an experence with someones manager running NN4.x on a 15" screen at 640x480, i always test my liquid layouts to be usable down to 600 pixles by 400 high (the height isn't really important)
My monitor is 19 in. and set at 1024x768 and I also work like Eric_Jarvis and Duckula do, I have multiple browsers open all at once...
Trisha, J.C.! I could read a 19 in. monitor set at that resolution a 1/2 mile down the street, you must sit on your couch and use your monitor like a television!
1280 x 1024 on 19 in Hitachi.
Europeans have better eyesite, Americans watch too much television. Yes multiple browser window panes open at once, not full screen!
Peace.
UMM 19inch monitor with it set to 1024 x 768 doesn't show up large on your screen
UMM 19inch monitor with it set to 1024 x 768 doesn't show up large on your screen
newt_sd,
It sure registers that way with my superb eye site!
JTODDV
want me to upgrade to new eyes?
1024 X 768 on my 14" LCD calls for reading glasses. Same for 1280 X 1024 on my 19".
I thought it couldn't happen to me...
I have a Sony 18" viewable (LCD as opposed to CRT) set at 1280 x 1024. Looks great to me, not too small, not too large. I always surf in IE 6 with full screen and AUTO HIDE on (auto hide for both IE and windows task bar), so that I don't see any browser or windows controls. So my viewing area is really 1280 x 1024 and some sites drive me nuts, especially the ones that are designed for 760 wide with alignment set to left. That is trully ugly! If you design your site for 760 at least set the main table to be center aligned...
When I surf I normally have about 30 windows open ALT+TAB works just fine usually, but sometimes I use the windows task bar as their grouping feature is really useful... Right now I have only 15 windows open, doesn't bother me at all.
I design sites to look OK in 760, but they are all % based so they look good on any resolution above that.
I just set up a new laptop (15") for entertainment browsing. It came 1280 out of the box. Everyone here knows that while we might play with monitor and font settings on our browsers, JohnQ is going to just plug it in and go. From now on, it's dynamic resizing of the page, fonts, and pictures based on resolution. Sniffing for res and swapping stylesheets based on that, I can handle a range from 640 to 1280 and the layout is fairly consistent. Another external js handles resizing the photos.
I have a 20" monitor set at 1280 x 1024, and I never use my browser at full screen width. My browser window is probably about 800 pixels wide (not including the IE "Favorites" or Opera "Bookmarks" bar), partly for convenience but mostly because text is easier to read when the window isn't too wide.
Not true. If you are building a fixed width site for 800X600 you should stick to something closer to 740. Having a fixed with at 760 will get the job done most of the time BUT it will cause problems on MAC's using IE.
-OMP
740 it is... although I don't really do "fixed" these days, dont you know it's SOOOOOO out of vogue :p
This growing 1280 x 1024 resolution is true... how do you design a site to look good (or even acceptable)at 600 pixles AND 1280 pixles? I hate to use any javascript unless I have to, much less 2 style sheets. More = less.
There are .PSD files that you can download. They contain a variety of browsers and platforms that you can view to get an idea.
I usually design in fixed width for 800X600 for personal sites. For company/business sites I usually go for a top bar that is set at 100% with the navigation set inside the top bar at the 800X600 setting. I don't worry about 640X480 anymore.
First, designing for a specific "standard" size means you have to rework the design as the standard changes. None of us know what the most common display sizes will be a year or two from now. Heck, we don't even know what devices people will be using.
Second, in my experience, redesigning a site with a liquid layout was far easier and required less troubleshooting than redesigning a site that used a fixed or jello layout. Once you throw the fixed widths out, you can stop worrying about them! When you change your site's design in some way, the pages mostly adjust by themselves and you don't have to search out every darn width attribute. I've also noticed that liquid layouts tend to be more cross-browser compatible, so there's less worry on that count, as well.
FYI, a Evolt has a good source on liquid tables: http://evolt.org/article/ds/20/2321/
1. Designs optimized for 800x600 break at high resolutions. Asa Dotzler uses 1600x1200 for his laptop because that's the only resolution above 800x600 that his laptop can handle. With font zoom set to 150%, many sites designed for 800x600 break because pixel-based layouts do not "zoom" along with the text. Paragraphs that wrap every five words are difficult to read. I wrote a "zoom layout" bookmarklet for Asa, but most Dell Latitude owners do not have the bookmarklet.
2. A site designed for 800x600 may look different on different computers. I saw a message on a non-techincal chat list asking why there was a "large blank space" on ucla.edu on one computer but not on another. (Centering your layout table makes this less of a problem.)
3. They annoy people who use a very low resolution because they have poor eyesight or a small screen.
4. They annoy people who keep their browser window as small as possible because that's how they like to work.
5. They may cause you to worry about weird intermediate resolutions, monitors in a portrait setup rather than a landscape setup, taskbars and AIM windows docked to sides of the screen, scrollbars, sidebars, and non-maximized browser windows.
6. In five years, when you've finally convinced everyone to keep their browser windows maximized and the last 800x600 holdouts have given in, you will have to redesign your site to keep it from looking "small".
Some additional reasons to avoid table layouts and use CSS instead:
1. Table layouts tend to break at 640x480, making all text on the page scroll horizontally. With a CSS layout or with no layout, paragraph text will wrap at the edge of the viewport even if navigation links at the top of the page require the page to have a horizontal scrollbar.
2. Some browsers have trouble displaying part of a table, so the first screenful of a table-layout page may not appear until the entire page has been loaded.
3. Table layouts are bad for forums because an unintentional (or intentional) long word or link can make all text on the page scroll. This is a problem at any resolution. Even at Slashdot, which uses an annoying "insert spaces into long words and urls" hack, trolls are constantly finding new ways to force the page to expand.
4. If a visitor tries to do something with tabular data on the page, such as a list of e-mail messages or a grid comparing services, layout tables may get in the way or may be blown to smithereens. Examples of what a user can do with tabular data: sort it, add a "row number" column, change the order of the columns, make the table data scroll independently of the page and the header row (set overflow:auto and max-height on tbody), make the header row float over the table when it is scrolled off but table is still visible (hard), make every other row have a #eee background, transpose the rows into columns, select the table or part of the table and copy it into a spreadsheet. Most of those can be done with a bookmarklet or user style sheet.
Also it tends to be easy to make a design scale to bigger space, but harder to scale smaller, so if you are unsure go for the smaller space
This is for an astrology site. Audience is 80%+ female age 25 to 45 (according to my orders database over last 5 years.)
I keep my browser at the 800x600 size approx and my screen size is 1024x768
The reason I do this is because I always have lots of windows opened all the time, I never maximize any thing and its easier to click around the outer edges to then the button bar at the bottom. (XP) I kinda like the look a little better too.
Mike
> I always surf in IE 6 with full screen and AUTO HIDE on (auto hide for both IE and windows task bar),
andrey_sea, how does one auto hide the IE tool bar "so I don't see any browser or windows controls." ???
In five years, when you've finally convinced everyone to keep their browser windows maximized and the last 800x600 holdouts have given in
Is there a way to get this information of my customers in my webstats?
This will create an implession that design is liquid when you resize a page or change resolution. At the same time layout will stay fixed that will give full control over the content.
I do PC Support for about 100 people. We recently rolled out a new desktop and we made 1024x768 the standard resolution. At least a third of the users changed it back to 800x600. A lot of people just can't see 1024x768 on a 17" monitor.
As for why some of us (includes me) don't browse in full screen, did you know that wide screens are bad for your eyes? Optimally, you're supposed to be able to see the entire line of text with shifting your eyes. If you're mainly looking at pretty pictures, I can see why you'd want your window to be as big as it can get, but if you're reading text on a regular basis, 800x600 is about as wide as you want to go.
I'm of half a mind to do that on some site or other. Should be fascinating, but it would be great if there already exists a study with a nice big sample.
