About 3 years ago, on my company's main login screen I set up a javascript function grab each user's screen resolution. When they logged in, it dropped their resolution into a table. Here's the totals before it was disabled:
[tt]width height total
------ ------ -----------
1024 768 457932
1152 864 155014
1280 1024 86596
1280 960 23502
1400 1050 6941
1280 768 4937
1600 1200 3479
1600 1024 1304
1920 1440 1053
1600 900 990
1280 720 620
1920 1200 564
1792 1344 559
1920 1080 194
1360 768 118
1856 1392 84
800 600 79
1280 800 64
1088 612 15
1680 1050 13[/tt]
As you can see, about 99.99% of our users are logging in with a resolution of at least 1024x768 or higher. For this reason, I coded with that in mind when I started redesigning everything. I made all the pages fit nicely in a 1024x768 screen, and used the method I described above to center the pages for resolutions higher than that.
I've found that setting a width of 995px for the content area of the page fits nicely on almost all browsers in a 1024x768 resolution (taking window borders and scrollbars into consideration).
When I told my wife to photoshop up a layout for our website to sell the puppies, I told her to make it fit in 800x600 since we would have a wider audience. However, if I were to do it again I would probably opt to make it fit in 1024x768 instead. There's just not nearly as many ppl using 800x600 as there used to be since monitors are getting so much bigger. Optimally, you should probably try to make your page scale to fit all ranges of resolutions, but I admit that I am just as guilty of designing my pages "in a box". For me, it gets reliable results when designing - but it has the drawback of forcing a horizontal scrollbar on people that use smaller resolutions or have their bookmark pane open in their browser.
-kaht
Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. - Homer Simpson
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