Hello again, i have been reading the topics about the resolution of a screen to build web site pages, but i confes, i am at a loss, my screen is 1024x768, i understand than if the resolution is high then images and all in the site becomes smaller, right?, if i am wrong please someone let me know, then i heard from somebody that if pages are design to be display ok, in a small screen 640x480--800x600, then they fit also ok on screens with higher resolutions, is that true, because my screen is 1024x768, and i am now busy building my pages does this mean that they are not gonna fit completly ok on screens with lower resolution, i hope somebody can help me.....

i build websites for 800x600 .... just love that resolution!

If you build your site for a 1024x768 resolution, the site will not display fully on a 800x600 resolution. IE - Your visitor will need to scroll. On the flip side, if you design your site for 800x600, you have to be careful that they scale-up appropriately to 1024x768.

Like eburza, I design my sites for 800x600, but always with higher resolutions in mind.

Hope that helps.

Nicky

I build sites for 800*600 as they look perfect when using 1280*1024 rez.

Our company policy is to develop under 1024x but for 800x (well, actually 760x by the time you allow for screen furniture). What that means in practice is that our screens are all set to 1024x whilst we work on pages, but the layout is optimised for 800x. When the design is finalised it is tested on all common formats.

This might be useful. The following is data taken from the metrics system we use on one of our busier sites. This shows the percentage of users at each screen resolution yesterday:

1		1024x768		9,587		57.67%
2		1280x1024		2,525		15.19%
3		800x600		        2,019		12.15%
4		1280x800		618		3.72%
5		1152x864		588		3.54%
6		1400x1050		230		1.38%
7		1600x1200		167		1.00%
8		1440x900		164		0.99%
9		1280x768		148		0.89%
10		1280x960		139		0.84%

As you can see, the majority of users are at 1024x. However, a significant number (12%) are at 800x which is quite a chunk to risk losing through a poorly thought out design.

OK, these figures use a pretty small sample - just one day - but they are fairly representative. We find that sites is certain sectors (design, technology etc) have quite different profiles, but the above are reasonably typical.

Wow those are hist stats for a high res. Most of my websites sit around 55% for 800x600.

I can recommend to work for 800*600 and taking the right space for use a column with elements for 1024*768 users only (banners, links, latest news, surveys, etc). Examples Sites: www.espn.com www.nba.com

If you need more precise stats about Display Screen Resolution you can take this:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

good luck

That w3schools link is good - worth some talkupation I reckon.

Interesting differences between my site and those figures. I might have to try to back date some figures to see whether the differences are down to time or market - could be that our customers are a little more tech savvy than the marketing boys have been telling us.

If you target any one resolution, there's always going to be some people who don't see it as intended.
Personally I don't see resolution as a limiting factor when designing my websites. They all use fluid layouts which will stretch or squeeze to fit practicly any resolution. The user can resize their browser window how they want and the site will take up 100% of that width.

Browser width is a user controlled thing, and you should be designing for the user, not their screen.

Even a fluid design has to be developed with thought to resoltions though. Unless you have no fixed width elements at all (which means no images, having to dynamically resize text etc) you still need to ensure that it will display on the lowest resolution you are aiming for unless you don't mind horizontal scroll bars.

Taking the Inoxia link in your sig as an example, it resizes well down to 800x, but if you go any lower you have overlapping text and missing navigation - so you are still designing to a minimum resolution, but just doing with a better approach to larger resolutions than many others do.

A fluid design is still the way to go to acheive the most flexibilty for different resolutions. someguy's statistics are very similar to what I've seen and even with the fluid design I try to make my sites look their best at 1024x768 while still working at 800x600.

Of course as more and more people are surfing on their phones and pda's and as those devices get better at delivering web content we'll probably all be back to making things work at 640x480. And then there are the people who only have 800x600 resolution, but don't have their browsers maximized. (probably not a lot of them, but some)

I think one of the most important things to consider in web design is the medium itself. None of us have control over how our sites are viewed and so the best option is to make our designs flexible. The goal should be to make our sites look as good as we can across different resolutions, browsers, operating systems, etc. and not to try to make our sites perfect in all or even any of them.

i go 770 width just so there is no scroll bar at the bottom of the page....unless all my margins ar set to 0 and I am going 100%

Well 800*600 is the standard on website resolution to make it more user friendly. Check this sites, nice articles about web design

http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004
http://www.wickedinnovations.com/webdesign.html

Try to think of web design as putting together elements in a box.

But what is that box?

It should be the browser window - but when you create a DIV or table of 800 (or whatever) pixels wide, you're redefining the box. Kind of like re-inventing the wheel.

hello everyone!
wow, its strange to hear about all those resolution questions. i mean in Ukraine we dont use 800/600 res on PC its for old monitors only. we have 1024 already and there are no needs for small res. its in the past!

The Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox has a resize button which allows you to quickly see what your website looks like at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and so on.

If you view your webpage in Opera and hit Shift+F11 you can get an idea of what your webpage will look like in a PDA.

Something else to consider is the slew of low resolution notebooks that are flooding the market. The majority of computer projectors, albiet a small market, are also in 800x600. Many schools and businesses use projectors.

I prefer a fixed width layout under 750 pixels wide. The biggest problem with liquid layout is it's hard to keep everything centered without wrapping the whole page inside a div or table. Some browsers, future and past, may not begin to render the page until they have transferred the whole block. When using fixed layout you can build it in layers to make sure the website loads in sections.

The website in my www button uses large images, which in order to keep them centered and keep a constant theme going forced me to use a liquid layout. All pages should scale well except the pages with images 800x600 and up.

Thanks a lot everyone of you, all your replies have been quite helpfull to me