From what I've been reading, if you aren't designing your site to stretch for different resolutions it should be designed for 800x600.

Is this still true? If it is, at what point should the standard be bumped up? There's always going to be some 40 year old in his parents basement running Windows 95 with 256 colors and 640x480 res. I've noticed sites have been saying F-it and have doing fixed layouts at 1024x768.

I've been doing centered layouts (mostly for 1024x768) that just happen to come out half-good on lower res as well.

800 x 600 is ideal really as a lot of people don't neccessarilly maximise their windows even when they have large resolutions available.

Your question is asked several times before, without a decent conclusion. Some people say 800x600 is like 1% now, and you can use 1024x768 by default. Others say people don't have to use their browsers maximized, so stick to 800x600.

My personal opinion is, 800 width is not very small after all, and I use it in some designs, but I still consider 1024 as standard and I can stretch my designs when I need some space for asthetical reasons.

800x600 is very rare, and if people with 1024 screen don't use their browsers maximized, and lazy enough to click on the max button for my website, I'm lazy enough to think about them and go on using 1024.

In short, I prefer 1024 as the constraint, not 800.

Professionals and who are keep in touch regular with net/computer using 1024X768 i think there are very less people who are using still 800X600.

I think a lot of it depends on the users - if you're doing a site that attracts a lot of "techy" or professional types, going with a larger design is probably fine. If it's targeted towards grandmothers - maybe not :)

You can always check your site's stats and see what resolutions are being reported there as well.