Should I widen my site?

From 800 px to 1000 px?

[shallow]

I'm considering having my website developer widen my site from 800 to 1000 pixels. I understand it is relatively easy to do from the standpoint of the developer. But it will be a lot of work for me since I have to recreate certain graphics and may have to visually adjust the way some things are laid out on a pages and I have close to 1000 of them.

I've heard that there can be an increase in income with wider columns, since I can use slightly larger ads and adsense ads won't seem so crimped. Has anyone found this to be true?

Are there other advantages? Thank you.

[londrum]

does he mean fixed-width 1000px, or liquid-width. because if it's fixed-width then it would probably be best to look at your stats first. if you've still got a sizeable amount of people viewing at 800 then the righthand chunk will be scrolled off the page.
if that is where you put your ads, then i don't imagine your income will go up.

if the only ads you've got are sitting at the top of the page, then it might not make a lot of difference whether its 800 or 1000, because you'll still have the same amount of people viewing it. you might even dent your earnings, because there will be more stuff for people to look at elsewhere on the page. the total ad space on 1000px might drop from 15% of the page area to 10%, for example.

[shallow]

Very thought provocative comments. Thank you.

I think she means fixed width.

Here are my stats for 2007.

1024 x 768 42.62%
1280 x 1024 17.76%
1280 x 800 11.36%
800 x 600 5.92%

If I understand your comments correctly in light of these stats, I think I should go wider. Or am I missing something?

Do you recommend fluid as opposed to a fixed width if I go this route?

Again, my thanks

[lammert]

1024 x 768 42.62%
1280 x 1024 17.76%
1280 x 800 11.36%
800 x 600 5.92%

This is non-information to decide which width your site should have. I am currently mainly working on a monitor with 1600 x 1200 resolution, but I tend to have two equal sized windows open which have a width of about 800 pixels each. Although your stats program returns 1600 x 1200 if I visit your site, my browser is something like 800 x 1100.

With 800x600 and 1024x768 it is common that people are browsing full-screen, but starting at 1280 they are likely having more than one window (partly) visible on the desktop and the size of the desktop is no longer an indication of the size of the viewable browser area. Remember that most people probably don't buy larger monitors to display your bigger ads (which seems to be your primary concern if I read your first post), but to display a larger number of windows on the desktop.

[shallow]

Thank you, too, for your comments lammert.

Yes, the main reason the idea of widening it intrigued me was because the developer said her income went up with the wider columns. But as has been pointed out, there is no guarantee that would happen at my site. So many hours of work would be in vain.

Money aside, are there any other compelling reasons to widen it? Does it look outdated at 800?

My site is graphic intensive and I'm kind of particular with the way things look. It can be a tedious and time consuming getting things placed where I want them because the Tiny MCE editor is not the easiest thing in the world. Further, the site is CSS and in a Content Management System, and I know nothing about either.

One other question, what would be the disadvantages of going fluid with the width?

[rocknbil]

The largest disadvantage is if someone with a **really high** resolution hits the page, your neat paragraph turns into two veeeeeery wide hard to read lines. :-)
If you use a "fluid width," make use of the max-width property to avoid it going too wide. (Not supported by IE 6.)

[londrum]

there's nothing "wrong" with sticking to 800. and there's nothing wrong with going for 1000. it all depends on your site and how you want it to look.
lots of sites still have fixed-width 800 these days (one of my big competitors still has it and shows no sign of changing, and it doesn't do them any harm)

it is easy enough to include different stylesheets for different resolutions on a single site anyway.
javascript can even recognise the fact that they have resized their browser after loading the page, and adjust accordingly, if that is what you want.
then you can have the best of both worlds.

the problem isn't in designing a site for 800 pixels, or 1000 pixels. the real problem comes when you design a site JUST for 800, or JUST for 1000.

you need a design that caters for everyone, regardless of what equipment they're using.

[shallow]

Thank you everyone for your input. It's been very helpful!

[g1smd]

Watch out for awkward people like me coming at ya with 1440x990 (widescreen!) or even 1680x1050 screens. There will be more and more, and bigger and bigger...

I try to make sites that play nice with liquid layouts anywhere from 800x600 upwards. They don't always work so well in 640x480 but try to degrade reasonably gracefully.

[old_expat]

I'm going through this as well and the problem I have with the max-width property is because it is not supported by IE 6 .. and 37% of my reader surf with IE 6.

[walkman]

>> Watch out for awkward people like me coming at ya with 1440x990 (widescreen!) or even 1680x1050 screens. There will be more and more, and bigger and bigger...

But you will have "problems" with all sites so you must be used to seeing them

[lammert]

But you will have "problems" with all sites so you must be used to seeing them

There is no principle difference beteen surfing the internet on a 800x600 full-screen browser, and with a 1600x1200 half-screen browser.

The only annoying difference I have seen is from the script kiddy like developers (and unfortunately they also seem to develop large high-traffic sites) that use some silly javascript and redirect the browser based on that information to a 800x600, 1024x768 or 1280x1024 version of their site.

Even when surfing on a 1600x1200 desktop, I don't want a website to fill up 1280 pixels of my screen. Even 1024 is often too much. The browser is just one of many applications filling my desktop area.

[piatkow]

With bigger screens making text flow into longer and longer lines I am actually thinking of actively restricting page width.

[lammert]

Yes, but why would YOU as a web designer make the decision how long a line should be on larger than average screens? It is the visitor who bought the screen and who had specific reasons to buy one with a more than average pixel number. If a floating website doesn't look nice or when large lines are difficult to read in a wide browser, it is the visitor who sees that and has the option to resize the browser window.

There is no reason to interfer with browser size, unless you see making websites as DTP work. But with print art, you have control over everything, including page size, and fonts. With web browser you have only limited control and the visitor has all sort of options (switching off styles, larger or smaller fonts, missing fonts which cause other sized fonts to kick in, differences between browsers in general) to override the layout that you had in mind.

[shallow]

The points are interesting about users of large screens who adjust their browser size smaller for various reasons. I personally prefer to read text in smaller columns; while I generally keep my browser window fully maximized, even the width on this page is a bit longer than I like. Newspapers, magazines, books all have relatively small column widths.

So for me, the question has been do I want to spend a considerable amount of time redoing graphics, etc. for a possible, though unknown, increase in income. I don't think so.

I'm seriously considering taking my site out of a Content Management System next year and having someone redo my site in a way that I do some back end work with a web authoring program. That's when I'll reconsider widening it.

Thanks everyone for the helpful, interesting discussion.

[Receptional Andy]

I would just add that horizontal scrolling always seems to feature highly on 'usability annoyances' lists. If you make a decision that guarantees around 6% of visitors will get a scrollbar, I would be very sure that they weren't visitors who bought stuff!

[lammert]

Screen size discussions now are different than a few years ago. The transitions from 640x480 to 800x600 and later to 1024x768 were relatively slow. On all these three resolutions it is normal to browse in full-screen mode, or nearly full-screen mode.

But a few years ago the natural slow increase in display resolution suddenly stopped. You can now buy 20" to 24" screens with resolutions of 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 for a price lower than I paid for my 15" 1024x768 six years ago and looking in my website stats, a lot of people have replaced their small display for something really big.

My guess is that 1000 pixels is about the widest a normal visitor will use. It gives a browser size of about one sheet of letter/legal/A4, the sizes we are used to. Just as with books and magazines. It is not difficult to print a book on newspaper format, but such a book is rather difficult to handle. Also many newspapers--at least in the Netherlands--have reduced their page size significantly for the same reason.

[MatthewHSE]

Does anyone have actual usage statistics for viewport sizes on general-interest sites? The reason I ask is that, although I've known a lot of people with very large, nice monitors, I've only seen one non-tech person in eight years who was browsing with a less-than-maximized window.

[shallow]

I am still struggling whether it's worth it to widen my site.

It's been several months since I first asked this question and am wondering if there are any additional thoughts about it. I've scheduled it to be widened sometime next month but wonder if it's worth my time and money (ie. I must pay someone to widen it).

Thanks again.

[topr8]

i have plenty of sites that earn me money that are fixed width of 760-780 i personally have no plans to change them.

[driller41]

I guess it is your own decision, there is no right or wrong answer, I personally like a 780px fixed width as I know where I am with that size - ie the text looks correct.

After 800px I believe you are better with a fluid design, but then of course your fonts become hard work for larger screen sizes, and when you get into using javascript to detect the users screen size you end up needing multiple css designs to render the different screen sizes properly, all in all it becomes a lot of work.

[shallow]

>>I guess it is your own decision, there is no right or wrong answer,

You're correct. And no one has given me a compelling reason to change. I have some pages that do not have a lot of text, so they would look sparse.

So if it's a toss-up, why go to the expense and all the work!

Thanks for the helpful replies.

If anyone can offer a compelling reason to widen the site, I'd love to hear it.