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Design: Optimal width for 1024px resolution?

cameronmoll.com — "Let's face it: The jump from developing for 800x600 to 1024xn is inevitable; not only inevitable, but just around the corner, too. Many of you are considering the jump. Some of you have already leaped. I suspect that some time in 2007 most of us will knock out comps optimized for 1024px resolution rather than 800px if we're not doing so already."

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  • Himself, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5What is 94%?

    (not optimal for performance testing, GPAs, or prime+ total rates)
    • vbsurfer, on 10/12/2007, -10/+14This is lame. Most designers are using 1024 for some time now. Since LCD displays, most people are running 1280 x 1024 anyways.
    • drakethegreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yes I agree, porn companies have been taking advantage of LCD screens default resolutions for some time now. I have to say I have no complaints.
    • kodek, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4I'm assuming this is WEB design? Be more descriptive. Thanks :)
    • panique, on 10/12/2007, -11/+61024px? That's sooooo 2003.
    • prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16Who cares what resolution my screen is at, who uses their browser full screen?
    • leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7thank god opera and ie7 both have page scaling, I'm getting sick of little web pages (like digg)....
    • technogogo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3Web 2.0 Statistics: 800x600 = 1.9%.

      http://digg.com/tech_news/Web_2_0_Statistics_and_Trends
    • thephilo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11024x768 and 1280x1024 are about 60% according to technogogo.
    • omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I have a 1024 x 768 monitor, so I still browse at 800 x 600. :( As soon as I can get a MacBook, I will make the move to 1024px. But I do wish that those who designed their sites for 1024px would offer an 800px option, such as Yahoo! currently does for its updated home page.
    • Bobski, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4The blind don't give a sh!t what resolution you design for, just that it's usable.

      Well....

      is it?
  • MVanNostrin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+54Elastic layouts are really the way to go. Locking your design into a single resolution
    (even if it is the most common) just isn't very user-centric. Better to design for the most common case and allow the design to gracefully degrade or stretch as necessary. Jacob Nielsen recently had a nice write up on this topic: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html
    • quasipalm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Exactly -- besides, I rarely have my browser maximized. I usually have it somewhere bigger than 800x600, but smaller than 1024.
    • liquilife, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4While this is a very good rule to go by there are instances where even an elastic layout would require a width greater then 800px. A great example would be this website called digg.com :)

      Update: My bad, digg.com is not elastic.
    • Burmask, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Great, practical advise and I agree with you 100%. Plus, centered, fixed width pages waste too much, above the fold, space on either side.
    • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2now get started on 1280x1024. will need to resize proportions though.....
    • carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10It really depends on the content, niche and layout of the site. A blanket "liquid layout is the best answer", isn't going to pass. What if the content of my site is travel, and is very text heavy. Say I rely on ads interspersed with my content, I want those ads to be in the same spot no matter if the user's resolution is 800px wide or 2560px.

      I think it's safe to design for 1024, depending on your niche. A site like this would be no problem as it is a bunch of techs who probably don't surf at anything less than 1280.

      My person preference is to do layouts at 900px. This way some one with 1024 can surf with their favorites open, and still not scroll.

      Chip-
    • PowerCow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Update: My bad, digg.com is not elastic.
      using the fluid stylesheet from userstyles makes it fluid. and it scales to about 500px and i even had the website screenshot add on for digg going.. so it scales well.
      http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/7564/image1dp1.jpg
      thats what it looks like if you want to see what i am talking about without trying it.
    • hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2So specify your picture sizes in percentages and let the browser scale them.
    • PowerCow, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Say I rely on ads interspersed with my content, I want those ads to be in the same spot no matter if the user's resolution is 800px wide or 2560px.
      you can as long as everything is elastic.. inlcuding fonts and pictures... of course you can also set limits to how elastic your site is and still allow some resizing to reduce the scroll lower resolution users will have to bear with.

    • hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Plus, "same place" is a relative concept Halfway down the text, and 100px, put your text in a "same place", but those "same places" shift relative to each other. Especially when I crank up the text size with Ctrl "+" (plus on the numeric keypad)
    • adolfojp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Elastic widths are good up to certain width.

      That is why newspaper articles come in columns. If the text area is too wide then the text becomes very difficult to read. With my wide screen display I find myself resizing the browser down to make the elastic websites easier to read.
    • hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Carguy84 seems to have gotten elastic and not elastic reversed.
    • firefox15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Any good elastic website also has a "max-width" set to prevent this sort of thing (text too long).
    • carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Nah, I have it correct.

      I prefer thinner columns of text in any case. It makes speed reading(scanning) a lot easier. My eyes can take in a whole block of text grouped together and pull out the important stuff a lot faster. If my eyes have to scroll left to right 1200 pixels, I'm going to get fatigued pretty fast. That's why a good bulleted list near the top of every article is also very effective.

      Chip-
    • cptpike, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Jacob Neilsen wrote:

      "Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600x1200 screen resolution."

      I make more than that but, my eyes are bad. I can kinda see what he's getting at but, that statement is bit ridiculous.
    • garbnzgh, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Hold on a sec, you're telling me Jakob Nielsen wrote something ridiculous?

      "To improve intranet quality, a company with 10,000 users would have to invest about $500,000 in usability. Thus, the return on investment for intranet usability ranges from a factor of 20 (for a company that starts out low and moves to average) to a factor of 10 (for a company that starts out average and moves to high)." -Jakob Nielsen
    • maiku00, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3People who try to pass off elastic layouts as the end all of problems solution are extremely ignorant. Both in a usability AND design sense. Yes, it is the best option some times- but to say that it is the ultimate solution is a falacy.
    • paulmetzger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Couldn't agree more.

      I have a 1440x900 display as the second head. Turned 90 degrees to 900x1440, it's amazing! However, even sites like digg require horizontal scrolling.
  • joeydoo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5So in 2007 we are going to "default browser window can display" 1024x768?
    I can see the reasoning behind this, as not everyone with 1280x1024 for instance would want to have ALL their screen full. Or be requiring to use a maxed window.
    The thing that gets me is that there has been little choice. Ars Technica (Others too, I can't remember who) has had a user selection for widening the page for a long time.
    Why hasn't that option been implemented by more websites?
    • Himself, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4http://GreaseMonkey.mozdev.org
      http://UserScripts.org
      http://userstyles.org/

      go wild

    • joeydoo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3hmm. Thanks. I just might.
      But... There is still no reason why a website shouldn't do it themselves.
      And where is a multi column text? When every one goes wide-screen it would make sense for a website to use a newspaper type layout.
      Shorter line lenght --- Multiple columns.
      It's much easier to read.
      This would start to be a possibility at 1024.
    • thehumangame, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Ever tried actually reading a website with multiple columns of main content? It doesn't work on a screen the way it works in a newspaper, because newspapers don't have vertical scrollbars. To get back up to the top and start reading the next column, you just move your eyes. On a screen, it's a pain.

      (Incidentally, there's an even worse case: the dreaded multicolumn PDF.)
  • spartan018, on 10/12/2007, -15/+8i cringe when i see low res computers. hopefully Vista will have a higher default res to help people get more out of their computers.
    • foobarra, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9More out of their computer? I think you mean they will have to buy new ones so graphics resolution snobs like yourself don't cringe and tell them they need to upgrade... You are typifying the HW/OS cycle - build a new bloated OS that makes your existing (perfectly working) hardware obsolete, and require the new OS to run any recent software (which you *must* have, right?), which in turn means you need to buy a new box...
    • darkdriving, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I think what he's trying to say is that he hopes the out-of-the-box resolution of Vista is 1024x768 versus 800x600, and it is in that way that people can be a little more productive with their screen real estate.
    • ApeInago, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1480x25 ftw
    • DigeratiPrime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3well i think the gui in vista is supposed to adjust to different DPI settings correctly. 96 DPI is pretty much forced on the user currently on all OS's and thus some people have to use 800x600 to be able to read text. With proper DIP support you can set your grannies pc on 1024x768 with 120 DPI or higher and everything will be just as large but at much better resolution for example.
    • salmonmoose, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1"i cringe when i see low res computers. hopefully Vista will have a higher default res to help people get more out of their computers."

      I think the default res might be video card dependant, however, when i installed RC1 it defaulted to 1280x1024, which is pretty much the standard resolution for PCs.
    • spartan018, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i'm saying that i think M$ should be a bit more helpful when it comes to people using their screen space, as darkdriving said. a lot of my friends ask me how much my monitor costs when they see how much space i have onscreen, because they just dont know they can give themselves more screen space. maybe a wizard or something when you set up a new Windows account would be useful, so all the basic preferences are just chosen then and there.
  • NightRush, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7

    http://www.duggmirror.com/design/Design_Optimal_width_for_1024px_resolution/
  • n00bst3r, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19People still use 800x600?
    • xxNIRVANAxx, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10unfortunately
    • zone, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Yes. This is the world we live in.
    • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16my grandpa does. he cant read small text. his monitor can do 1600x1200. hes still on 800x600. it burns my eyes though
    • timealterer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11As a matter of fact, I know a lot of people who use about 800px or 900px as the width of their browser even though they have a higher display resolution. The lesson: do not mistake statistics of what screen resolutions have for statistics of what browser sizes people use!
    • Pharaoh777, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2My TV has better resolution than 800x600.
    • CriX, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2grandpa needs to learn ctrl+mousewheel
    • bairy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Casual, non-technical users may not know there's an alternative. And those who do might prefer the "bigger" resolution.
  • xamox, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Yeah with stylesheets sizing shouldn't be an issue.
    According to google analytics the people who visit my site breaksdown like this:
    800x600 - 8%
    1024x768 - 36%
    1280x1024 - 23%
    1600x1200 - 4%
    all other resolutions make the rest.
  • grubesteak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Ultimately, there is no one resolution one should design for, but rather, you should design for your users.

    My company has 13 different domains under its umbrella. I was really wanting to find out more information about the screen resolutions used by our viewers, so I headed on over to Google Analytics and started using it for all those great details.

    Overwhelmingly, across our 13 domains, users have 1024 X 768 resolutions (by about 60 percent, on the average). We're currently in plans to move away from our 800 X 600 design and bump it up.

    If you're serious about designing, use Google Analytics and design to meet your viewers needs are, not what someone tells you everyone is using. You might just find that all your users having 800 X 600. Designing for anything bigger would be a waste.
    • MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I find that it's easier to make a layout expand than it is to make a layout shrink. With most designs, you HAVE to set a minimum.
    • Timbit42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why do browsers report OS screen size instead of the browser window size?

      I think reporting on browser window size would be more enlightening and useful to web designers.

      I wonder what would happen to the statistics if browsers started returning browser window size instead of OS screen size?
  • heptahedron, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Please don't do this. It's presumptuous to assume that everyone wants 1024-wide windows even if their monitor can handle it. Personally, I like a window width of of about 600 pix (800 is not so bad) so that I can have multiple windows open side by side on a 1920 x 1200 monitor. Even though 1024 is no problem for me, I hate sites that want to consume so much screen real estate.

    Filling the screen is selfish. Let the user decide, not the designer!
  • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14If you absolutely HAVE to design a fixed width site design it to fit 800x600 or less. Most sites go wide for no purpose other than to add more clutter and make their sites harder to read. It also plays havoc when I open more than one windows side-by-side. The whole reason I bought a big widescreen monitor was to run multiple applications so please stop hijaacking my space. We won't even talk about how unpleasant browsing your wide layout page is on my phone.

    With a little clever design a liquid layout page will look better at ALL resolutions.
  • tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5My website only gets 3% of its visitors at 800x600, but last I looked at w3schools.com, something like 15% were still using it. Not ignorable yet, considering people were clamouring when Firefox hit double-digit market share. ;)

    Anyway, at the end of the day you need to design for your target audience first and foremost, and that includes considering things like screen resolution. Just think about who you want to engage. Bleeding-edge users (geeks, gamers, etc...) are going to have higher screen resolutions. Old people won't.
    • daofma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Except that some of us with higher screen resolutions don't browse at max resolution. I keep my browser window at just the amount I have to to display digg and slashdot and such. No wider, because that's a waste of my screen space, where I have to make room for things like a triple wide start menu so I can see the date, AIM, etc.
  • PowerCow, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2liquid css, then everyone is happy, even me when i tile windows.
    http://www.webreference.com/authoring/style/sheets/css_mastery2/index.html
    (I know most people know about %'s but i didnt know about the picture trick on page 3)
  • vladx, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1if you are still using a 800x600 resolution, then its your fault.
  • Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Most users are using IE, so why bother using standards-compliant HTML?

    That's the kind of reasoning I'm seeing here.
  • jotux, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1This is a silly question, the optimal width is obviously 1024/phi ~ 632.88.
  • lrgabriel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Great--now we'll have 1024x768 pages, with only 800x600 px of content and the rest all ads...
    • klang, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The article uses a "content {width: 377px;" .. and seems to be designed for a pagewidth of 800. This is not an unusual design. content text + left or right nav bar.

      Just because I have a 1400x1050 and a 1600x1200 screen it doesn't mean that I want more non-content there.
  • bryan986, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Fixed resolution is never optimal
  • retsoced, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7According to the W3C ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp ), 58% of users have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. This is almost to the exact percentage what any of our 5 plus sites see on a daily basis. That's a great statistic, and I would love to be able to design to that size exclusively. It's just not high enough. Period.

    As stated you design to your users, and until 90% or higher get to the higher screen resolutions , it doesn't make sense. What's more, there are still a lot of execs and high level managers within the company viewing at 800 x 600, so to them the site would be too big, and therefore be broken and/or not right.

    People like to throw out these figures like standardistas touting CSS, tableless, standards oriented design - stating that it has to be this way, if you don't do it this way, you're not a professional. It's an easy target, just like saying Flash is 99% bad, or plopping AJAX and Web 2.0 in the title of a Digg post. There's no definitively right way to build a website - but there is a wrong way. Alienating you users is just that.

    There's nothing new in this article, just lots of shoulds, coulds, and woulds. No kidding it's inevitable that screen sizes will increase. Unfortunately what is not inevitable is that "designers" who consider only technology, and what they want will never see the light about usability.
    • AgentofId, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Well put! I was about to say the same, but you stated it perfectly.
  • kasted, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1well that guy didn't design his site for 1600x1200, view background image in firefox, its only ~1500px wide
  • bobbyd87, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Your best bet is to mimic the big news sites that have increased their width to abandon the 800 x 600 users. By that I mean, CNN and NY Times who's increased to 980px and 972px respectively.
  • agarc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5In most cases I'm finding it appropriate to design for larger resolutions. However, I'm not a fan of every website switching to larger sizes. When 17" monitors were considered "large", it was wonderful to upgrade in size and be able to have your web browser open along with a bunch of other apps all tiled on the screen. Now it seems like everybody (obviously I'm generalizing) is upping the font sizes and design widths to accommodate our 24" widescreen displays. Sure, the readability seems better, but all of my desktop space is gone again! Fonts keep getting larger and larger (look at Comcast.com)! ;)

    I have a much greater appreciation for the well-designed site that is easy to use, has readable font sizes, "Web 2.0"-ish design techniques and occupies 700px in width or less. This combination is very hard to find!
    • doubledoh, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I like big text thank you very much. Thank god that tiny text phase circa 2000 is gone.
  • ApeInago, on 10/12/2007, -5/+17680 x 1920 ftw
  • jayswain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7If you're creating a website, you should be designing for your target audience/market.

    You should create the document according to what environment you think that they (the user) are going to be running.

    Digg.com .... could probably be @ 1024x768

    MealsonWheels.com ... should probably be designed @ 800 x 600
  • charged2885, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7i really dislike the idea of designing for a specific resolution. i rarely browse with maximized browser windows. my windows are rarely wider than 800 pixels. as long as the important content is viewable without having to horizontally scroll, i'm happy (like digg for example. the ads are the only thing cropped in this window)
  • BrainiakZ, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Dude.. I have been working a WUXGA for well over 2 or 3 years now. If you are stillusing 800 x 600, then you need a new computer and monitor. Nuff said.
  • madsmith, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Making the windows larger implies that either

    a) more text will appear per line, flattening out paragraphs and negatively affecting reading performance
    b) the site increases the default font size (which in turn implies that the user should be sitting further away from there monitor for a comfortable view).

    If we accept that the human eye's field of view is fixed and that there's little variance in the average distance between the user's eye and the screen, then we can infer that we will also have an optimal width of the medium. I suspect that this would be just around 800px as 1024 just seems to wide to comfortably read a paragraph of text.

    I think that the wider screens (like my Dell 24FPW) are best served for 'parallelizing' content to the user (more windows) and not giving a single piece of content additional space (bigger sizes).

    Addendum: one benificial use to a wider presentation is that it allows you room for tangential content such as advertising and navigation, which is not part of the focus of the viewers attention.
  • thehumangame, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9OK time for a newsflash here.

    Your website is not the only thing I am looking at.

    Your website is not so important that it deserves to obscure the other windows I have open with its width.

    It is presumptuous to think that, just because a user has a display with 1024 or 1280 horizontal pixels, that you get to have all of them.

    There are ways to gather statistics on the user's actual window width instead of irrelevant information like screen resolution. These ways should be used.
  • Skettalee, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2I cant stand being on computers with less than 1600 x 1200 or widescreen versions of them.
  • timmarhy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3mobile access to the web is the ne growth area, only an idiot would ignore that.
  • olegk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Is it possible to scale fonts using CSS when user scales the window?
  • Hegemony, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1'Bout time. I didn't get a high resolution monitor so half my pixels can fire off white.
  • antdude, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3How PDAs and other low resolution devices?

    Mirror: http://www.duggmirror.com/design/Design_Optimal_width_for_1024px_resolution/
    • paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I agree. Not to mention simplicity of design generally. Ever tried looking at Digg.com on a smartphone? Fair to say it's pretty much useless on my HTC Wizard..
  • doubledoh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Uh, no. Are we forgetting mobile devices?

    Websites need to be developed with multiple style sheets for multiple resolutions, including mobile devices that have half the resolution as regular monitors.
  • truthseeker69, on 10/12/2007, -2/+02 or more monitors is the only way to go. Where are the L337-ist? Multiple apps on multiple monitors solves many problems. Try: http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

    Nothing less than 1280x1024 should be outside of the "Accessibility" -> "Magnifier" sandbox. Crieth.
    • thehumangame, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Bet that's nice. Bit of a pain carrying the second screen around in a laptop bag though.
    • truthseeker69, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Yeah...that does suck. R U Homel3z?
  • MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Problem is, we now have devices, such as those pocket sized laptops they got at frys, that use a very small screen resolution. I personally am sticking to a fluid design.
  • celotil, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Noticed a few people mentioning that they or someone they know is still running their monitors at low resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768 for, of all the silly reasons, large text.

    I'm going to say this here, as I've said in many forums,

    Change the text display size in Windows!

    (I'm presuming Linux users know how to fix their font sizes in X11.)

    If you need your text large, just go into the display settings and up the font-size percentage. If you've got a monitor that will display at 1600x1200 then up the resolution to that and then up the font display size to about 140%. Nice big text that at high resolution and looks clearer than low res chunky big text.
  • Yage2006, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I haven't run 800x600 since the mid 90's . 1024x768 and then 1280x720 for the most part.
    It shocks me to learn people still optimize for that.
  • Picard102, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Design for your users, not your prejudices.
  • hesiod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Seems like the "optimal width" would be one that scales with the end-user's own resolution. Or window-size, for that matter.
  • lordbal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If you're really a good designer, you will use your CSS in a way that it will fit the screen optimally for 800x600 and 1024x768 users.
  • r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Best thing you can do really, is set the body tags font-size to 67.5% (makes it around 10pt at "Normal" size setting) and then for all other measurements (except maybe borders and image sizes) use "em" units. With 1em (using the above body font-size) being 10pt, and 1.6em being 16pt.

    If you design it right then it will look good and any resolution.
  • cprior, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I hate how I have to scroll sidewards since the design update here on digg. Is nobody surfing this page non-maximized?
    If they only had put that non-content sidebar to the right!
    (Where many skyscraper ads are hidden from my view anyways...)

    I can only speak for myself: Around my browser window I have about 6 other windows visible. And if its just one line of a remote scren session in an xterm...
    • ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agree 100%. I was about to post the same thing. Just because someone has 1024+ res available to them, does not mean they will use it all. In my personal experience, I find that the more real estate I have, the smaller my windows get, because I want to cram more in.
  • mjjack, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I have to wonder if anyone here actually read the article - which screen resolution to design for was hardly the point. The point was about what size of grid to use in a comp which was much more interesting than tired discussions about screen resolutions.
  • authenticmoll, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Yes, mjjack, I've wondered the same... Most seem to have missed the point almost entirely.
  • authenticmoll, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1...and there hasn't been the kind of traffic to the article that one would expect from a link with 500+ diggs and digg home page prominence, which kind of confirms the assumption that most probably didn't even take the time to read it.
  • legbend, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1UX Magazine- http://www.uxmag.com/ -does a good job of adjusting the layout, but then you run into the % of javascript-enabled users and blah, blah, blah... Coke vs Pepsi argument...
  • whiteyMcBrown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As a web designer, I think a lot of people here are kinda misguided when they use the stats of web usage. I mean, it's all about your target audience. When I design things for techies, then I can feel free to use a higher resolution. Older women play a surprising amount of branded online games, and very often have their resolutions set not as high (shockwave.com knows this). Often, you don't want to design for the largest mass of people, but for the lowest common denominator. A company may prefer that everyone is able to fully view the site, rather than excluding the few that don't have their resolutions set that high. My mom does internet banking and listens to online radio and reads the news and she finds it much easier to do so at 800x600... most people I've seen, over 50 yrs old, do.
    • Himself, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1and its that 'lowest' thinking that keeps design in the dark ages by pandering to dialup users -- the kind of people too cheap to spend money
  • porkstacker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1THE top web design gods are (in no particular order):

    Cameron Moll
    Andy Budd
    Jeffrey Zeldman
    Molly Holzschlag
    Shaun Inman

    But section 508 is where it's at: http://www.w3.org/WAI
    • treyjp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1says who? those might be some nice suggestions, but i'm not sure what made you choose them specifically.
  • JesseJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ever thought about why paperback pocketbooks are that size? I bet they could make huge sheets of paper, but it is is not nice to read a wide page... same goes for web page width.

    The human eye should not jump more than 3 times per row, or you get eye-fatigue. That is a truth also behind successful websites (Yes there are exceptions). The contrast of a screen is also higher than that on paper, so it is even more strain on the eye to read a screen than paper. So making a wider web page is not something I would strive for as a web designer.

    I would rather see a higher dpi than wider dpi (a screen with the same width in inches but more pixels per inch, aka 'smaller dots') but as it looks now, the as many inches as possible is what people supposedly want right now... that's what is being sold... big screens with huge bulky Lego dots for pixels.
  • SPARTACVS, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It's not just LCDs that use 1280x1024. Any good 17" CRT can do 1280x960 and look great.
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