I am perplexed since I have be trying to design my web hosting site for 800x600 resoltution, but there is sooooooo little room to work with.

I was wondering if it was safe to upgrade to a site designed for 1024.


I know yrs ago it was best for 800x600, but has the general public upgraded enough to safely make pages for 1024?

Really I would try 1024x768 . I am sure people still use 800x600. What I would do is if you have a stats program that lists what people view your website in go by this. If most use higher then 800x600 then I would go for 1024x768

Do 1024x768, almost everyone uses it.

Browsers are windows. They can be any dimension your visitors choose for them to be. Screen resolution factors very little into Web design, much less than most designers give it credit. All it does it set a maximum a browser window can be. It tell you nothing about whether people use large icons, small icons, toolbars or keep a sidebar open.

If you're concerned about a site working on browser windows of all sizes, then try creating a fluid design.

If you're set on using a fixed-width design, then the equation is simple: the wider you go, the more people you stand to inconvenience. Do people still use 800x600? You betcha. Do people using 1600x1200 have browser windows open to 700px wide? You betcha.

Originally posted by the_pm
Browsers are windows. They can be any dimension your visitors choose for them to be. Screen resolution factors very little into Web design, much less than most designers give it credit. All it does it set a maximum a browser window can be. It tell you nothing about whether people use large icons, small icons, toolbars or keep a sidebar open.

If you're concerned about a site working on browser windows of all sizes, then try creating a fluid design.

If you're set on using a fixed-width design, then the equation is simple: the wider you go, the more people you stand to inconvenience. Do people still use 800x600? You betcha. Do people using 1600x1200 have browser windows open to 700px wide? You betcha.

I agree with the_pm

Yes your best bet would be a fluid design. Between Operating Systems, Web Browsers, Browser dimensions, picking a set resolution wouldnt do much. Try for a fluid design.

As a developer it's part of your job to research the target market, whether it's your own site or a clients. If you're creating a low-budget web hosting design, I suspect your target audience will be sat in front of a home computer, not using a PDA or cell phone. That's an assumption, not a fact.

It gets tricky for developers to choose a size to design at, but a good developer will rarely compromise functionality, or impact by designing for lower browser sizes, that are fluid to look good on 1152*864 and above.

So what's your target audience? Do your site stats tell you anything? Research is imperitive for a good website development, whether you do it yourself, or the client provides it for you. But since the 'client' is you, you should get to it ;)

And for some extraneous information, the general consensus on SitePoint was that anywhere from 25%-35% of people are still on 800x600.

Lowest common denominator....that being 800x600, always work for the majority :)

I apologise, but I completely disagree with anyone who says design for X resolution. You should design for the target audience.

Indeed, you should design to the target audience, but 10% of your customers (assuming you sell a product of service) are running at 800x600 you have to ask yourself, can you afford to potentialy lose these clients?

That why my site(s) are all viewable at 800x600 without the need to scroll right and left. There are many different methods one can use to make this happen.

PS- If you make the width of your site 800 exactly someone running 800x600 will still have a bottom (right/left) scroll bar because the browser viewable window is actually aprox 780.

Hi Xephon,
I am very much a newbie to all this and have been doing a lot of reading about web desigh. Most of what I've been reading is that it depends on the audience you want to attract. There are still 800X600 monitors out there, but not many who have the money to be online. Overseas there are still many viewing on 14" 800X600 or less. If you are trying to reach the US market then I'd say it wouldn't hurt to step it up a little. And the advice about checking the site statistics is good too.
Hope this helps

I design all my sites at 775x600 or so. 800x600 is still the standard in web design.

Try to eliminate side to side scrolling. Up and down scrolling is ok depending on the amount of data you have on your website. Don't make it scroll down more then 3/4 of your orginal website

Maybe in another year or two it will be 1024x768 as a standard.

Alot of people still use 15" monitors you can be suprised.
Always try to attack your full market potential.
People with 17+ monitors will see your website in 800x600 just fine and the people with 15+ montiors well, they will just click away very quickly.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

GS

How many people use side bars/media bars when visiting your site? How wide are they? Do you know?

I have no idea how many use media bars when visitng my sites, but I do know that if your site scrolls up and down the right hand side scroll bar will appear. :)

This makes the viewable area less than 800 pixels wide.

Try it and see.

I have no idea how many use media bars when visitng my sitesPrecisely! So how do we know that 780 is a good size? Or 750? Or 650? Or 1000? We can't know the browsing habits of our visitors the way we'd need to in order to proclaim one width to be perfect for everyone. Even if we could, we couldn't know the browsing habits of our future visitors either.

This is the risk you take when you design to a certain width. This isn't to say its a risk that cannot be taken, but it is a risk that can be eliminated through well thought flexible design strategies.

1024 * 768 all the way!

check your stats... i have 2 sites both over 30k month traffic and it states 17% and 13% still use the 800x600... and my designs are best viewed in 1024x768...

if you have about ~25% visitors using 800x600... you should take the old folks into consideration :P

I have started switching over my designing preference from 800x600 over the past year or so and I like to do a couple things when I'm making these new web pages.

1) Have all the critical information appear on the left side of the screen. This is because browsers load left to right, with excess width being corrected by chopping off content on the right side of the web page.

2) Design for 1024, but have the graphics, text, etc that loads in that grey area between 800 and 1024 be somekind of filler.

I haven't mastered this pseudo duel width design by a long shot, but I really thing having a site that is fully functional at 800x600 yet looks like it was made for 1024 is something that worth shooting for.

Maybe I should just start design for 1024 x 768 and put an ad on the page that says "If you need to scroll right or left you need a new monitor and perhaps a new computer too!)

ha ha ha

Originally posted by CustomPerfection
Maybe I should just start design for 1024 x 768 and put an ad on the page that says "If you need to scroll right or left you need a new monitor and perhaps a new computer too!)

ha ha ha You could also sell advertising space for Lasik eye surgeons. :emlaugh:

i work on 780 width too. i leave something for my drop shadows if the layout is centered ;)

I always design a max width of 780.

That way the majority of the users don't have a horiznotal scroll bar.

I don't really like designing sites that stretch because the site can look very different from one resollution to another. And I like having control over the final product. 780 widht is enough for me and I hardly ever feel that the design would look better if i had more room.

I myself am on a pretty high resollution so if it looks good for me and it looks good in 800x600 then I'm happy.

Idan

Most sites I design, I don't go over 700, and they're either centered or left-aligned.


Can't go wrong.

Whenever I design a website, I let it be around 750.. and 100% when expanded...

I avoid using Javascript, and when I do I insure there are an alternative <noscript> tags...

Peace,

definately 1024x768 - its an average across the board resolution

Dave

Yes, 1024x768. There are very few people who don' t have this resolution anymore. Definately go with it.

I think you will find that us web designers run our monitors at a much higher resolution than the visitors of our sites.

I run my 21" Viewsonic at 1280 x 1024, only because I don't wish to be completely out of touch with the public.

I really like to run it at 1600 x 1200. I mean, I am only a foot away from it for crying out loud! ;)

Sometimes when I have freinds over at my office I like to bump it up to 2048 x 1536 just to mess with them! ha ha ha

I run my resolution in 1280x1024, but I still design all of my websites to look good in 800x600 resolution as well. Ignoring the 800x600 resolution customers will not lose you 10% of users - it's closer to 30% of all internet users (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), by Multiple (http://www.onevision.co.uk/xq/ASP/id.789/qx/default.htm?CT=LeftNav) Sources (http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm). Although many of us here on this board have much higher resolutions, we are all tech-savvy computer users. The average computer user will not have a good video card, or even know how to change their screen resolution if they wanted to. You HAVE TO consider these users when designing your layout.

The scrollbar takes up 20 pixels, so the max. width should be 780px wide. Fluid designs are usually best, but on websites with not much content to begin with, it can make the page seem even smaller and content-less when viewed at higher resolutions and stretched out if you go with a fluid design.

That being said, if you are developing a website that will specifically target tech and computer users, the average screen size will vary from this significantly, and it will probably be the 5-10% of users with 800x600 as stated previously. But a general rule of thumb (at least for now) is to ensure your website will look good with no side scrolling even at an 800x600 resolution. With a hosting business, most of your users probably will know their way around a computer and have higher resolutions, but there will still be a good number that will not. Hope this helped in your decision making ;).

Yep, 780 is the magic number for 800 x 600 viewing. :)

I would go with 1024x768 as well. To bad for those with 800x600.

I have an observation to make, if you all don't mind me sharing. I have my screen resolution set to 1152 x 864, so technically speaking designing at 1024 x 768 would be fine for me? No? Nope.

I, as well as many other users browsing the net, like to have side bars open at the side, this cuts me down to about 910px browsing space. I also know that many users on higher resolutions such as 1600 x 1024 browse with around 780px browsing space, or maybe even less.

I really don't recommend using fixed width, at all. Yes, as designers we sometimes have to make that sacrifice due to client request etc. But if you can, go fluid, and make it work on;

- As many devices, user agents and platforms as possible
- As low a resolution as possible

StyleSheets can work wonders in these situations. So my answer to the question, what resolution should I design at? Is none :)

While I would agree with Equentity - Pauly, I must say that sometimes designing a page "fluid" can look very empty at high resolutions while over crowed at low resolutions.

There is no one answer for every single person who comes to the website, so you must design for the majority of the people who visit.

800x600 is actually a lot more common than people think. Check out this link over at TheCounter.com:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/July/res.php

It's taken from stats last month, from everyone that visited a TheCounter.com counter... and that's a lot of people, around 73,424,669 visitors actually, just for the month of July.

This is up to date information and as you can see from the stats around 24% of the net population STILL use 800x600 resolution, therefore it would be wise to design your website so that it can work with this res without any side scrolling or layout issues. Even better dynamically, if you want a full-screen approach, scale up between the resolutions so that it looks good at all sizes. :)