Well for years I (and I imagine many other) have designed with 4x3 monitors in mind. But now everywhere you go all you can buy is widescreen monitors (and I understand that even then they are not all the SAME dimensions!) What are you guys doing to cope with this? Are there any good resources out there on the net that I should be reading up on regarding this new phenomenon? Thanks in advance
The trouble with web design is you have to try and cater for as many users as possible, and currently a large proportion still use 4:3 monitors at 1024x768 resolution. I design to 960px wide if I'm using fixed width (which is most of the time), and keep all my designs centered, as left aligned websites look terrible on wide screen monitors
Just design for your audience. If I'm making a site about primate hand tools and how to make fire, then I'll design for 800 x 600 (yes they're still out there!). If I'm making a site about Mac users with $120 haircuts, then I'll design for 1920 x 1200 But most of the time, if I'm making a 'general interest' site, then I'll keep it nice for 1280 x 1024.
So what are you going to do for the many people who have widescreens but the browser only runs in one half the screen? The point is, you don't know and have no way of finding out.
I agree with the good doctor. I cannot imagine buying all that work-space and wasting it with maximized windows. Right now, I'm at my work station, with a 24" 1920×1200px monitor. I have open Emacs, Xterm, Firefox3, and Vista in a VM, running IE7 and Safari. (Safari is minimized.) Opera and Xpdf (a pdf file viewer) are minimized. The browsers are all at 800×600px and pretty much tiled, with some overlap. I can edit a file, and simply refresh the browsers for side-by-side comparisons. (Next time I'll fork over the dough for that 30" 2560×1440px monitor—no more overlap!) I'll grant that web development is a special use case. When surfing, I'll resize Firefox to 1024×768px to account for the less competent developers who cannot make pages that accommodate a variety of page sizes. My real world experience is that people who use their computers for actual work like to have multiple applications open. People who play with their computers are the ones most likely to run maximized in large monitors. cheers, gary
How? @Gary, I'm torn between using two 24" screens or one 30", like Google does. I'm down to my last CRT monitor so I have to decide. Right now, I use two 17" CRTs, which works great, but, yeah, I can do better.
Just make 800 or 900 px WIDE Fixed Width designs or Fluid Width and them seem to cater well to any old or new screen. I agree that you get less space, but then it is upto you to decide, what matters.
Most people are concerned about catering to those with larger monitor sizes but on the other side of this topic is the people who use those EEE 'portable laptops' or 'mini notebooks' that I see all over Ebay these days. I've seen screen sizes on these listed as 7", 8.9" and 10" (and maybe other sizes). What does your average 800 or 900px fixed width site look like on these small screens??? What does a fluid layout look like on these monitor sizes??? Personally, I've never seen one of these units up close so I don't know. Scotty P.S. - hey kk5st, just glue three of those EEE minis together side-by-side and you'd have your 30" monitor for about a third of the price....