Most popular screen resolution?

And monitor size!?

[galaga]

Just about to start building a new site. It's sort of a personal site but it's gonna be pretty swanky. Lots of fancy eye candy because if it doesn't google well then...who cares! I ain't trying to sell anything. Anyways, I was just wondering graphics and design wise (particularly for the index page) what screen resolution and monitor size should ¦I be building the page(s) for? I mean I don't want to create a killer site if 90% of people get the graphic half chopped off and at a weird size etc.
Thanks in advance.

[Robert Charlton]

I target 800x600, and go for about a 750 width to accomodate the MS Office tool bar that many users have docked on the right hand side of their screens.

For many sites, but not all, I'm partial to fluid layouts, but I don't want the site to display too wide on higher resolution. Newspapers use narrow columns because text is more readable that way. A lot of users might not think about resizing the window, though, albeit some would probably like to if they weren't forced into a fixed width.

I've always thought that the ideal arrangement would be to have a fluid layout with a maximum width (and resizable fonts), but there is no max width table attribute.

In this regard, Eric Jarvis posted something on this thread that really intrigues me...

...techniques to look at are floating a menu on one side, setting a maximum width for the body of text in em units (so you are effectively setting a line length in terms of characters), and then allowing the space in between to expand and contract as space becomes available

Eric, how do you do set that maximum width?

[jamesa]

I try to stay away from absolute truths, i.e.- "this is the right way, and that's the wrong way". Best to educate ourselves on the pros and cons so we make educated decisons when building a site. Either may be right for a particular circumstance despite how strongly we feel about it.

Few things I don't see mentioned often: (1) there are some users who LOWER their screen resolutions to 640x480 to overcome vision problems, (2) many people are still using 4 year old computers (believe it or not ;) with horrible monitors no less, and (3) the readability of wider text columns can be GREATLY improved with an increase in line height (the reason newspaper columns are so narrow is so they can cram more words on a page without losing readbility).

So you just don't know how people will use their computers. Flexibility is the key. Most of us are power users and forget what the web is like for the "commons". If you haven't seen a decent sampling of your users interact with one of your sites in their own environment, seriously try to do so. Don't touch the mouse, don't say anything, just watch. Can be a very humbling experience.

[grahamstewart]

There is actually a

max-width

CSS property - it works fine in Opera7 and NN7, but unfortunately it is not supported by IE at present. Would be kinda useful if it was :)

A lot of users might not think about resizing the window

I wouldn't worry too much about this. My theory is that if they are serious enough users to have the resolution set at greater than 1024x768 then they probably have enough brains to know when to resize a window.

Conversely, The ones that are still figuring out stuff like resizing windows are very unlikely to mess with the resolution settings!

[jamie]

jello,

i'm with you if know one else is ;-)

there are still so many people new to the web who wouldn't know how to change things even if they wanted.

that's why we serve up a fixed layout which means easy readability in a 430px width middle column - no neck straining, no browser resizing.

we don't want to educate people about standards or technologies, we are here to make their online experience as relaxing and easy as possible.

i've come across so many people who after years of pc use do NOT know how to change the resolution (the what the say?).

this means they stay with factory defaults.

heh, we also use css so they can change font sizes and print the pages on a white background with no left and right columns.

but that's us and our target market.

i love wired's site and on my larger screen adjust the width of the browser accordingly so that the text is not endlessly wide. but i also love the bbc which is fixed width. if the information hits the spot who cares?

(ducks and runs for cover)

Jamie