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Standards compliance and scalability question.

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Jul 27.2007

I’m in the process of designing a layout template for my company’s next e-comm site and I’m attempting to make it 100% standards compliant (to me that means W3C validation for HTML 4.01 strict, CSS and Section 508 accessibility compliant) while making the pages scalable so that someone viewing the site on a 800×600 browser and someone viewing on a massive 72″ plasma can navigate the site with equal ease.

The problem I have discovered is that in order to create a scalable site (AFAIK) I must select some resolution to act as a base size. I chose 800×600 after reviewing the visitor resolutions reported on our current e-comm site from Google Analytics and noticing that it was the lowest resolution represented. One of the things I’d like to know is if I’m correct in this assumption, and if I’m on the right track to creating a truly scalable website.

Another question I have is, is scalability an important aspect of designing a good layout or am I wasting my time on something that people won’t even bother with? I understand the need for standards compliance and I’m all for it (though this is the first site I’m designing on my own from the ground up that will be 100% compliant), but as far as scalability I’m not sure if it’s something that will actually be appreciated. Any feedback from fellow web designers would be welcome.

I have a sample of the current layout live if you’d like to see what I mean (as I said it’s currently optimized to go no lower then 800×600, but scaling up is just fine). Please ignore the very rough look of things as this is just a layout proposal.

[url]http://www.therionresearch.com/temp/index.html[/url]

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@ray326Jul 27.2007 — is scalability an important aspect of designing a good layout[/QUOTE]Not necessarily. The primary attribute of a good design is delivering the content, which you already know. The fluidity of the layout is mainly important if horizontal scrolling is unacceptable. Establishing a minimum size wherein the presentation is acceptable shouldn't be a problem. What you don't want to happen is content overlaying other content.
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@steveaauthorJul 27.2007 — First let me say thanks for the reply Ray.

I kind of figured that it wasn't as key as I was imagining, but as is often the case I've already spent my time getting it down before sitting back and thinking about how practical + useful it is. I think my train of thought was it's easier to design the site to scale in the earliest stages of development rather then finding out later through metrics that there are a large number of visitors with high resolutions that are immediately bouncing because of readability issues. Either way I'm still interested to know if others out there have gone through the trouble of designing properly scalable sites from scratch, or if anyone has any experience where they've had to modify an existing site to be scalable.
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@kiwibritJul 27.2007 — I reconfigured my company's site to be fully scalable, and conveniently readable at 800x600 upwards. So far, I have found it acceptable at quite high resolutions. If it ever does become an issue, I will use max-width - on the basis that, for the most part, only really modern computers with IE7 or equivalent will be using it - and IE7 supports max-width. That said, really high resolution screen users probably use a smaller window for browsing.
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