I'm a lot more careful when designing other people's pages, but just decided to cut loose and have fun with my own. I gave it kind of a comic book feel for my non-web portfolio stuff and just had fun with it. Over time I've experimented with a few things and have been able to break the home page completely out of tables and still work, with one exception. It works as low as 1024x768, but lower than that it breaks down.

Hence the question-should I care? Who still uses lower resolution than that?

Depends on your audience, really. One of my clients has some older, crusty machines that still run Win98/ME/2000 at 800 x 600. From my experience, the average percentage of users that still use 800 x 600 is around 2-3%, and that's enough for me to consider it.

However, some sites I work on don't have any 800 x 600 users (surprisingly) and I've built that way in the past.

Build it, see if the 800 x 600 users are there, and if they are, then revise accordingly.

People who have problems with their eye site or some with older computers.

I don't use absolute positioning for layout and instead use fluid designs. On one I have just seen has a slight scroll when using 800x600.

Fluid layouts are pretty cool but kind of limited in a way.

You could have a site that works in both higher and lower resolution.

Here are a few layouts.

http://www.glish.com/css/

I was worked on 800x600 few months ago, now in my laptop it is 1280x800.

I am in the process of designing a website that older people will want to look at, so I would consider it then.

It depends on the client. At www.x2interactive.gr we recently designed a website for the Competition Comission og Greece (The website will be online in a couple of weeks) and they needed the design in 800x600. The reason is because the website has to be available to the largest possible audience and 800x600 is still used by http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp 14%. 14% is many people!
Thanks

I still see some businesses with 800x600 resolution screens as standard, and in my lecturing role I see quite a few people with minor visual impairments that find it much easier to use 800x600.

Of designing for higher resolutions remember that you may be excluding some potential visitors/customers.

Originally Posted by spyros

It depends on the client. At www.x2interactive.gr we recently designed a website for the Competition Comission og Greece (The website will be online in a couple of weeks) and they needed the design in 800x600. The reason is because the website has to be available to the largest possible audience and 800x600 is still used by http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp 14%. 14% is many people!
Thanks

Also remember that is just people who go to their sites. w3schools is a pretty techy site and it would be assumed that many people who go their have higher end computers and aren't really "normal" users who want to grab some news, watch a few youtube videos, and check their mail. Depends on your audience. More tech savvy and richer users will have the higher resolutions but older people, poorer people, and non-tech savvy people will have older machines with lower resolutions. I recommend making sure it works on 800x600 but make it look best at 1024x768 as most likely that is your main audience.

We still design all our sites to work properly at 8x6 as the minimum because there ARE still people out there using it and in the healthcare industry, we need to have things function properly for the as many people as possible.

8x6 works well for greater, but greater doesn't work well for 8x6. Most really big sites have 8x6 and so do I.

msn has recently converted to 1024x768 lol ...