Screen size to design for?

What screen size should I design for?

  • 640 x 480

  • 800 x 600

  • 1024 x 768

  • 1280 x 1024

  • Flexible to all sizes - resolution independent

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making a resolution independent site gives me less flexibility as a designer though, no?
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That's a fair enough point if the site is like Ed says, just your own bit of fun. If it's a commerical site or something like this site that is going to get viewed by a large and varied audience then surely that audience is far far far far far far more important than 'your flexibility as a designer'.

I'm not having a go at you per se but that kind of thinking is why a large chunk of the web is so bad in my opinion. Too many people creating sites for themselves and not for the people who will end up using them.

As regards the other point someone made about percentage based tables being slower - don't even get me started about using tables for page layouts rather than just data! Proper, well written semantic CSS driven markup will be quicker every time (when it works ;o)

As you may have guessed I'm a bit keen on web standards (www.webstandards.org et al) even if browser support thereof drives me crazier than it's safe to get in public.
 
so im not supposed to think about myself when making a personal site? heh, thats weird :eek:
 
Originally posted by lurk
As a user who runs at 1280x1024 and who's hardware goes to 11! (well 1920x1440 ;)) Let me plead for you not to fix things so that they will not scale to higher resolutions. There is many an e-commerce site that has lost my business because I could not make out the stupid 8 pixel font they were using.

So where is the fifth choice "I design my sites to be resolution independent" :)

-Eric
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Amen brother!

:eek:
 
Originally posted by toast
"Resolution independent" sites with taags such as <table="70%"> are longer to load. I thought this ought to be precised.
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That is not totally true.

The fact is that a browser must determine the actual widths of everything before it can correctly render table widths, etc. In the older Netscapes it simply refused to render anything until it determined that. In IE it happily rearanges the tables as things are being figured out.

The way to make the tables settle in quickly is to make sure that ALL images ALWAYS have height + width tags. So should tables. And if you are using fixed table sizes make sure the math works out. If you have three cells at 20 pixels each but the table is set at 100 pixels, that will throw things off.

The trick to getting things to render (note this is a rendering speed issue and not a download speed issue) make sure you give the browser as much info to work with. Omitting things make the browser figure it out... and not all browsers make the same decisions.
 
Originally posted by Jason
so im not supposed to think about myself when making a personal site? heh, thats weird :eek:
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Personal sites... Yeah... Do whatever you want.

Like goynang I always suggest to our designers that making a Web page that operates like a Web page (strechy, user deciding what font size, etc) is just part of the design challenge.

The web is not print. The Web is not TV. You have to desing for this medium, and that means you have to let go of pixel level placement in exchange for a site that works at multiple resolutions. (I always feel cheated when I encounter a 640x480 site glued to the top left corner of my browser running in 1280x1024 mode.)
To me this just makes everything more interesting and more fun... but I can see why designers would be pulling their hair out. ;)
 
Hi Jason,

I had the same dilemma recently and had not checked out the typical web statistic sites in a while. What I found is that -roughly- 70+% of all web users employ a resolution of 1024x768 or higher, so this situation is improving. Especially if you're not catering to users with older computers, etc. Know thy audience first and foremost but this should be safe.

-PJ
 
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