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My first pre-adsense hobby site (now with ads) was made for 800x600 and its all but a waif like strip today.
Depending on the available space in the window, a javascript changes the position of the DIVs for VGA, SVGA, XVGA
My prognosis from 2000 was also wrong.
I thought 2000, that with mobile internet and PDAs, the 640x480 VGA resolution would become more important again, but it seems nealy nobody surfs the web with such small devices.
My site looks good on all resolutions, and if you shrink the window it even copes with that moderately well. I really wouldn't use a fixed width, as browsers can (and do) cope with flowing text round objects very well if you use tables or css.
I personally use 800*600 (yes, I know - I'm a relic from the stone age) and really, really HATE sites that assume my browser window is set to a higher resolution meaning I have to scroll left and right merely to read the content. I usually give up and go elsewhere, and certainly wouldn't click the ads.
My advice is to consider the fact that visitors WILL view your site in a variety of resolutions, and they like the screen as it is thank you very much. Therefore it's down to you to make sure it works on most resulutions and not to make assumptions :)
It's also a mistake to assume that just because someone has a resolution of 1280x1024 they will always have that width available in their browser - many people have their browser windows sized smaller than full screen.
It's one thing if it's your site and you know your users, but for most sites a fixed width of 1280 wouldn't be a good choice.
I saw a really nice design some time ago which was at this width, but if you resized your screen the div on the right popped neatly in below the one on the left, and looked perfectly 'right' there. Unfortunatly I didn't save the link and forget what the site was, but it seemed a really nice solution.
My screen is set to 1400x1050 but I never keep pages the size of my screen. I end up juggling between many windows while I work. I hate when a website resizes my browser. Even worse are the ones that resize a full screen blank page and then pop up some teeny little thing of a website over it. I'd laugh at them if it wasn't so annoying.
But people do not surf on a big res monitor with a full screen window! My sites are all 800x600 for this reason. Bigger is a pain.
[edited by: Genuine1 at 9:35 am (utc) on Oct. 21, 2006]
[google.com...]
I just bought a brand, spanking new Compaq system, and off the shelf it's got the monitor at 800x600 resolution, so that's still the default on some brand new systems - and this one undoubtedly sells a lot. I absolutely HATE sideways scrolling and won't stay on a site at all where I have to for any reason whatsoever. If I have to scroll sideways, I'm gone.
Euh... Blame windows.... ;)
Seriously... I usually go for 1024*768 as a minimum, while making sure 800*600 users can read the content without having to scroll sideways... They might miss some advertising and some sidebar content, but hey...
1024 x 768 = 55%
1280 x 1024 = 14%
800 x 600 = 12%
less than 800 x 600 = insignificant
greater than 1024 x 768 = remainder
I still design for a fixed width of 800, but I set font sizes, etc., to look their best at 1024. I also design so that "above the fold" relates to a 1024 x 768 display.
I can envisage designing with a greater width if the 800 x 600 percentage drops far enough. But it will still probably be a fixed width display. As a user I dislike most fluid designs. Typically in the higher resolutions the lines of text spreads across the page so that it becomes difficult to read.
Do you mean at what screen resolution do you develop your sites and present them to the world?
I construct everything using my screens at 1152 x 864 and have found that this, for the moment, seems to suit most libraries, Internet cafes and lap tops as opposed to large screen PCs and Macs.
Developing for very high resolutions for now is pointless, just look how long it's taken 1024 x 768 to overtake 800 x 600 and I still go to many offices that have 19" CRTs set to 800 x 600.
What's next--splash pages and "This site optimized for [Insert browser name]? :-)
Are we back in the 1990s, when sites were often designed for a specific screen resolution and even said so?
Groan..... I remember those days! Sooooo last century.
I remember our intranet site aimed at mobile users from those days. The guy who wrote the technical help website for mobile users wrote it at 1024 * 768 and put one of the aforesaid messages on it.
Lo and behold, the laptops we were issued at the time ran on win 3.1 and were capable of vga resolution only.
The guy wouldn't change the site as office politics won over common sense.
[edited by: david_uk at 2:18 pm (utc) on Oct. 21, 2006]
The most recent number (2006) I see for people with 800x600 display resolution is 17%, and that's not even counting people surfing in windowed mode as opposed to full-screen. Why would anyone willingly throw away that much perfectly good traffic is beyond me.
Dr Doc, I can't believe you said that! "It works in the common browsers people use." But not IE6 without your js frig. IE6 is the most commonly used browser at the moment.
1. 1024x768 3,954 50.11%
2. 1280x1024 1,165 14.77%
3. 800x600 943 11.95%
4. 1280x800 482 6.11%
5. 1152x864 284 3.60%
6. 1440x900 183 2.32%
7. 1600x1200 144 1.83%
Just for info, the 1600 and 1440 are almost double what they were in August, and 800 is down about 3% from 15%.
And it is not that hard to take care of the main reading portion being too wide, just set a max width, or fixed width and have the sidebars expand. There are limits of course, but the 800 to 1280 range is pretty easy to cover.
But then I have this fetish about staring at some website that is 750px wide on my 1280 screen where half the screen is glare white. Easy to fix, but nobody ever does :(
[edited by: Wlauzon at 11:36 am (utc) on Oct. 22, 2006]
My monitor is wide screen 2,200+ x 1,200 but i always design for the 800 screen, and then take 50px off for good measure. I'd never design for larger width, most people do have large resolutions beyond 1,000, but they don't have the full screen open, especially surfing from work.
I make sure my sites work on 800x600 without horizontal scrolling.
It's not so much the number of pixels that you set for the width. To me, I will consider the readability of the text.
Typically, a narrow column is about 3 to 5 words - just like in the printed newspaper. For viewing on the monitor, I prefer to have each row of my text to average between 12 to 17 words and not longer than 20 words.
For a web page with 2 columns, I don't go wider than 760px. However, if you are into news portal, then you may want to have 3 or more columns and a wider width.
So design your web page layout for your human visitors - readability. And not because the new wider screen that we have to stretch the page to cover use up all the space.
I tested that smaller than 640*400 my page looked ugly so I fixed min-width to 10px more. Then I noticed that higher resolutions than 1600*1200 made it look strange so I fixed the max-width 10px smaller than this.
And that it...my site always looks good no matter what's your resolution.
And I know that IE doesn't support min/max-div (I think it now supports it in v7) but hey, I can't do anything more...people should download better browsers.
IE max-width, min-width -- a not-so-simple solution, but it's handy [webmasterworld.com]
