800x600 is the standard screen size even for those using higher resolution monitors. Inf fact most webmasters stick to 800, but I should say it depends on your content and design. There are times when the content fits best on a 1024x768 basis or fluid, instead of cluttering into 800 Besides is annoying when you are using a resolution above 800 and your layout is 800 pixels or lower, aligned to the left instead of centered; all the blank left on the right for higher resolutions looks anti-aesthetic
If you notice that most big corporation uses 1000 nowadays. Look at IGN, askmen and many others. I think if you build for the future then you build at 1000 resolution. Most of my sites are 800 but I feel they are so cramped up so my newer ones are 900-1000 resolution. I have a 24inch widescreen monitor and it just feels wierd making site at 800 resolution :?
you should never base a site design on opinion, but rather on metrics http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/April/res.php shows that 16% of people use 800x600, and that may vary by the nature of your site I read in an eye-tracking study that the most easily read paragraphs are around 400 pixels wide. Something to keep in mind when delivering content
Right now I design for 780 as well... I may start getting away from that because I think that just as the 640x480 standard was not that long ago the 800x600 standard is starting to fade away and most sites will be designed for 1024x768.
I designed my site in a weird way, its suppose to rezize, but, some things cant, like the flash animation.
There is a major difference between migrating from 640 to 800 and from 800 to 1024 or 1280. A 640 width is doable, but is a bit cramped. An 800 width makes it very easy to create optimal width, for reading, columns. Studies have forever found 60–65 characters the maximum comfortable reading width. Newspapers prefer to use half that. At a 16px (12pt) em, and an average character width (English, proportional font) of 1en, a max comfortable width column is 480px. For those of you who favor the tiny 10px em, that's a limit of 300px. When you look at designing for a larger width, keep in mind the viewers reading comfort. It'd be pretty silly to lose visitors because the competitor's text width is easier on the eyes. Since my 1999 era laptop died, I no longer have an 800×600px monitor, but all my browsers are sized to 800×600 for reading comfort; even on the one 1600×1200 monster. Editors are about 600px wide and terminal windows are 80 characters wide, so vary with the font size. The largest window on any of my desktops is the solitaire game, and it's sure as hell never maximised. So forget about monitor size. Think of the browser window size. cheers, gary
I use 760 for my newer sites, but my main site, exoticcarsite.com, is 1024 as the content inside it is 1600 and 1920 in size.
Okay, after reading this thread last night, I stayed up to make sure my site (www.jiastyle.com) would fit into the 800x600 without the horizontal scroller showing up. I hate that horizontal scroller and was vacillating on whether or not I want to bother trying to make it fit into the 800. My screen is 1024 and I was trying to convince myself that it was out of sight, out of mind. But this thread and horizontal scroller-hate convinced me to squish everything in so it would fit. Boy that took some creativity, in addition to making the adsense a half banner instead of a whole banner. There was no other way.
768px - just to make sure every browsers scrollbar (ranging from around 15-30px) doesn't crush the page.
Fluid for me (Well normally the holy grail layout). By the way the sites in my sig are not my work I have just started doing some SEO for them.
I usually use 750 or smaller. I hate scrolling from side to side, and I don't want my visitors hate my site.
I hate pages with that "Looks best in 1024 with Windows XP and hijacked IE with yahoo! toolbar and lots of adware."