I agree. How do you think, in %, how many people uses 800x600 resolution? It would be interesting to read some statistics about this problem.
I would keep 800*600 for a while longer yet. Unfortunatly some people still use it Might be worth considering having both options available although a screen asking resolution before entering the site doesnt always go down too well.
I still think with the amount of diffrent screen sizes being used these days Fluid designs are the only way to go.
I do prefer fixed sometimes but when designing some sites they have to be scaleable due to the target audience and accessability reasons. e.g. health and education sites. When designing fixed sites i design for 800x600 but scalable I design for 1024 x 768 that will scale fairly safely to 800x600. I have seen some fixed sites at 1024x768 but have yet to take the plunge myself. I'll give it about 12 months I think. ** EDIT ** Just found this on W3C faq's Display capabilities Although a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 is predominant in the US, Europe, and Japan, in some areas, such as South East Asia, smaller screen sizes such as 800 x 600 may still be common. Flexible design approaches help significantly in addressing such differences these days. On the other hand, there are also a lot of other devices (PDAs, cellphones,...) with much more restrictive screens. Although not all Web pages may need to work on cellphones, try to design with as few limitations as possible.
Hello, Labrock. Different sites receive different types of visitors. As it can be seen in this interesting thread, you have 8% of your visitors using 1280x1024, while everyvote has 22%. Depending on the geographical location, users will have bigger or smaller monitors. I think that outside the U.S., 15" monitors are still the norm, and they are not very suitable for a resolution of 1024x768. So, you must take into account the nature of your site and where your visitors reside. A flowing design will be ideal to cope with all resolutions, but if you don't want to use it, a design for 800x600 will also be viewable at 1024x768. The inverse is not true. People looking at your big design with a smaller screen may not even notice your right column! Cheers.
I've noticed that the majority of visitors to my sites are in 800x600 so I design for that resolution. When there is a new winner I will make the switch. 800x600 is fine as far as I'm concerned anyway. Anything too wide makes for difficult reading.
thats a good point that NetFireGuy makes actully and I'd forgotten about it. Text isn't readable in really long lines nor is it easy to read in small columns. It's more readable at a happy medium so unless you are looking to have a scalable design where the font size scales as well you need to consider that if you design scales to far down or up it may become less readable. I've used the max-width to control text widths but it's more difficult to manage minimum widths if you client is running at a low resolution or routinely doesn't have a maximised window.
Even 800px wide is too wide for me! What about those who use MSN and ICQ and keep them on the side? I always used to design for 768px wide to allow for ICQ/MSN etc. Now I design for 728 incase I ever want to implement the AdSense leaderboard. *blush*. Personally I like the absolute control I get over my designs by working to a fixed width instead of a relative one. Pete
FWIW, when you make everything scalable and fluid, each individual visitor gets to decide for him or herself how much text per line he or she wants to read. Problem solved What's readable to you and me isn't necessarily readable to the next guy. That's the beauty of the Web; you don't have to treat it like a piece of paper.
So Labrock, is that a comprehensive enough answer for you!? There's something in there for everybody I think.