I have designed a website; LisburnPages.com which has a fixed-width homepage designed to fit an 800 x 600 screen without horizontal scrolling.

The rest of the site will scale to match your screen size, however I didn't do this to the homepage because I couldn't do it nicely, and keep the layout as tight and clean as I would like.

The problem is that on a widescreen monitor (typical minimum resolution 1280x768) the page looks a little lost in whitespace.

I have searched the web's major sites - eBay, Yahoo, Google, MSN, BBC.co.uk and loads more in search of a nicely designed homepage that scales from 800x600 right up to wide-screen formats such as 1280x768 and higher while still looking quite neat and professional.

Could anyone point out a few?

http://www.amazon.com/?

Aha! Never though of Amazon! lol thanks.

Any more...? I want to see as many different ways of doing this as possible!

I'm not trying to self-promote, but I don't know of another example:

http://www.lightenupontario.ca/

I'd use the light green from your logo instead of the purple, but it might work as an idea.

Adam's got the best answer in my opinion.
To counter act that waves of blank space, you need to put something that blends well with the design into the background. It can be as simple as a gradient (like in Adam's example) or something more intricate.

Additional examples:
http://www.brennanyetterjazz.com/
http://justallow.com/
http://www.federalhilleyecare.com/

Couldn't get the lightenupontario.ca site to load at all.

Regarding the other examples, I have been tinkering with this a bit (although - as you said, the purple didn't work to well).

If you want to see what I had done you can take a look at www1.lisburnpages.com - one of our webservers currently reserved for development.

Didn't like this, but I'm continuing to look into it. Keep those examples coming.

Sorry, HandCoder. I was just checking something on my server. Try it now.

And when you build it, try it with a lighter version of the green instead of the purple.

http://www.lease-hire.co.uk

I think is a good example of how to make a website scaleable it does not go as small as you wanted but it does go from 1024x768 upto very large res very well.

I think aiming for as small as 800x600 is a bit OTT now a days very very few people even use that res anymore your better of aiming it at a slightly higher res IMO.

Liquid three column layout is what you want to make this work though and then make your middle column the one which adjusts to the screens needs.

This is a good tutorial on how to make such a layout but you will need to adjust it to your needs of course.

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatuto...torial0915.htm

I wouldn't say that, John. It depends on the site. Some of them still have a large enough percentage (anything over 5% is large enough for me) of users in the 800x600 range, and some don't.

It's fast becoming obsolete, though, I'll grant you that.

Here's some interesting stats on that subject from my analytics:

1. 1024x768 - 55.36%
2. 1280x1024 - 14.38%
3. 1280x800 - 13.73%
4. 1440x900 - 6.65%
5. 800x600 - 5.15%
6. 1152x864 - 1.07%
7. 1280x960 - 0.64%
8. 1680x1050 - 0.64%
9. 1280x720 - 0.43%
10. 1280x768 - 0.43%

That still does not tell the whole story though does it 99% of them 800x600 res visitors will be from countries like India which are of no use to a company which sells products in the UK or US for example.

Now as already mentioned I suppose it depends just what market your aiming for but if you plan on selling anything can you honestly see somebody with a 10year old monitor buying anything of any worth from a website?

like the Car Leasing website I gave as an example how many people from the UK do you think have a 800x600 res screen? On top of that how many people that would buy a car leasing contract have a screen res of 800x600?

Why aim your website for a minority who are not going to spend money?

Its not that they carnt use the website simpley it is not optimized for them dont forget.

Also out of all them screen sizes you missed out mine 1920x1080.

That's because yours didn't come into his top 10. He didn't miss it: it missed him.

When I made the statement that I made, it occurred in markets and sites where relatively few people came from India and a large percentage of them came from outlying rural areas of Ontario where they don't necessarily need or want the newest and greatest thing (it's usually pretty obvious by their dialup connections). In the example I'm thinking of, these are legitimate, paying, B2B customers who just don't have or see the need for new equipment when the old stuff they have works just fine for them, and there's nothing wrong with that.

As far as leasing a new car...yeah, you probably have a point there. But it really depends on the marketplace and the product(s)/service(s) concerned, and this isn't something you can make a blanket statement about.

I have designed a website; LisburnPages.com which has a fixed-width homepage designed to fit an 800 x 600 screen without horizontal scrolling.

The rest of the site will scale to match your screen size, however I didn't do this to the homepage because I couldn't do it nicely, and keep the layout as tight and clean as I would like.

Can i ask Handcoder, how did u scale the other pages to match a screen size in the first place? I'm having similar problems with a site i'm trying to create.

Bells, you need to use a fluid/liquid layout.
The link in Adams sig has some examples (very useful, IMO).

Originally Posted by johneva

That still does not tell the whole story though does it 99% of them 800x600 res visitors will be from countries like India which are of no use to a company which sells products in the UK or US for example.

Now as already mentioned I suppose it depends just what market your aiming for but if you plan on selling anything can you honestly see somebody with a 10year old monitor buying anything of any worth from a website?

like the Car Leasing website I gave as an example how many people from the UK do you think have a 800x600 res screen? On top of that how many people that would buy a car leasing contract have a screen res of 800x600?

Why aim your website for a minority who are not going to spend money?

Its not that they carnt use the website simpley it is not optimized for them dont forget.

Also out of all them screen sizes you missed out mine 1920x1080.

I beg to differ.

Country Breakdown for the same dataset:

1. United Kingdom 88.7%
2. United States 6.12%
3. Ireland 1.53%
4. Canada 1.53%
5. Australia 0.53%
6. Czech Republic 0.53%
7. Romania 0.53%
8. New Zealand 0.53%


Sometimes it just comes down to accessibility. My mother for example, has an 800x600 resolution because her eyesight isn't great - but she buys more online than anyone I know. The same goes for a neighbour of mine.

You can't really generalise.

Bells123 - best way to see how I did that is to examine my source code - feel free (even if it isn't the tidiest).

http://www.lisburnpages.com/privacy is a static page
http://www.lisburnpages.com/styles/mainstyle.css is the stylesheet for the site
with some corrections for IE: http://www.lisburnpages.com/styles/iestyle.css
and IE7: http://www.lisburnpages.com/styles/ie7style.css

I make heavy use of the FLOAT tag in CSS - and have used percentage widths where necessary.