Okay, I think this is one of those I need a third party to help me with.

I am building a website for someone. The content is centered in the page, actually it's just two floating divs one for the menu and one beside it for the content. Now the size of these two boxes combined is 800px wide. Its wider than I normally go, but the person I'm making this for insists there is too much background showing. I cant go any bigger for those people (all be it rare) with lower screen resolutions and there's really not enough content to fill the additional void.

Without making the content of the page bigger, can any of you offer a suggestion what is the best size to code for? I'm thinking they want it best viewable for only screen resolutions of 1280x1024... I can add a js function to re-size the browser, but I really really (emphasis on really) dont like dont that.

So what do you do?

Something's telling me the solution is to find another client, but I suppose that's not really an option. I have a hunch what they want is for the site to look good on their browser and their resolution without thinking too much about their visitors.

How about setting the widths of both or one of the divs in % to let them expand and contract with the resolution? It sounds though like there's a lack of content which may still leave too much empty space.

Another thought is to add a header and/or footer with a 100% width. The background is obviosuly still the same behind the menu and content, but I've found that the 100% header/footer can sometimes leave the illusion that there's less background, especially if the background on the body matches the background behind the content.