What width do you design for?

And, its not hard to create a design that is completely fitting withen a 800x600 window, and still looking OK on other resolutions.. take a look at one I just finished, http://www.thejosher.com/mysticgrey/

Off topic, but that design has a heck of a lot of fun. I've learned all sorts of applicable CSS I haven't used before. One that was super handy, was baackground-posistion.. thats how I got the images after all the links, and the arrows on the nav menu.

And I finally got a design to center vertically-- that was a tough one. I ended up having to use a table, but its not really a part of the design. Its just one row and one column.

It was also fun trying to get the menu on the left to stay on the bottom, and automatically adjust the height, and go upwards instead of downwards, based on the menu items

Josh

 

You defiinately want to be keeping 800x600 display users in mind as their are plenty of them.

 

Almost 30% of the web in fact 56% for 1024x768 and then just over 10% for higher res (I'm in that group). I didn't know there where thatm many still.. wow.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Josh

 

I use 791 and 728 for my site. 728 is great when you put adsense leaderboard on the top or bottom

 

i thing 791 is a little too big for some browsers... 768 is optimal (from my experience)...

when i adjust to 1024 i put width to 1000.

 

Choosing a width depends greatly on the users of the site. Tech sites can normally get away with a width of about 1000. Normal sites should always be viewable without a the need for horizontal scrolling in a 800x600 window. That being said, I think the ideal design would be an elastic design.

 

I try to design for minimum widths, not max. I have to say that most people do use 800 x 600...for now. As monitor get cheaper, more people will go to the higher resolutions.

 

i design at 790 pixels width, seems to work well with 800x600 and gives you an extra bit of room for content.

 

dunno redbull... i've never seen a 10 pixel wide scrollbar. I just measured mine, and it's 27 pixels wide, which means at 800 wide, the absolute widest i could potentially design for would be 800 - 27 = 773 wide... and that's assuming that everyone's scrollbars are as narrow as mine, which might be a pretty good assumption, but i'd allow an extra 10 pixels just to be safe.

So i guess it comes down to, if your site will have content below the line, and your visitors will have to scroll, i can't see getting away with 790 wide. If, however, your entire site is above the line with no scrolling needed at 800 x 600, then yeah 790 should work fine. I guess it comes down to site design, but in my experience, most sites scroll down.

As an example, I designed this site, http://primefloral.com, at 770 wide, and if i so much as add a pixel, you'll see horizontal scrollbars at 800 wide.

VG

 

I design for 800x600.

770px wide has always worked well for me.

 

I always design for 800x600, most of the time I us % though. I mean I hate people with Dailup still, as I hate people with 800x600 still, Arg! I have 1600x1200, nice and spacey (I have a 24inch monitor)

 

It depends on the site. I really hate side scrolling so that's why I design all my own sites for 800x600. But if I'm doing a site to someone else and he/she wants the site to be wider then I'm not going to argue about it. If someone is paying then they are getting what they want

 

Yes, the web designers at my company think that way too... 'Oh, nobody uses 800x600, we are so experts, we know everything'... Hell yeah, but, what is FF? And Opera? LOL! They think everybody uses IE and big screen resolutions... I know a few people with 19" inch monitors using 1024x768.

Let me explain you something, a user (a NORMAL user) buys a new computer, with a 17" inch LCD monitor. The guys at the computer store install Windows XP and leave it all by default... The NORMAL user gets the computer, see things a little messed up and think 'maybe that's because I have a big monitor' and start using it... What resolutions does he have? Yes, 800x600... Does he know what is a resolution? No he doesn't!

About the small kb graphics... Well, for one side I like to keep my bills short, so no need to pay for more bandwith when I can optimise it... Also, the NORMAL user will buy a 128 or 256kbps connection because it's cheap and he thinks it's broadband... If he trys to access your website and it takes ages to load the problem will be your website and not the internet connection...

But again, this is like everything on this boards... We have the ones making big bucks and the others trying to make some cents...

 

agree exactly. Although I find that when all's done my sites look better in 1280X1024, because everything feels a bit less cramped.