Today, what is the standard width for websites? I have looked at some of the more popular websites and most of them seem to go for widths between 940 and 980 px. Is it today common practice to design for 1024 screens instead of 800?
@aj_nscJun 23.2009 — #I would say yes. I personally have stopped designing my websites to work on 800x600 resolution, you simply sacrifice too much in your design to satisfy 5% of internet users.
Websites don't necessarily have a width either, good websites are fluid and will scale to fit the resolutions/window size they are viewed on.
All that being said, as much as most (in my opinion) good websites (the ones you see on css galleries) break in 800x600, we're probably not doing right. Really good designs are completely fluid and work on any resolution.
I probably answered your question in the first paragraph of this post.....?
As for those 5% who are still using 800x600, I suppose they are already quite used to horisontal scrolling...so it should not be much of a problem.
Although I agree that a fluid design is the ideal solution, I think that a fixed width has it advantages, e.g. if using images in the layout. Also, I find it much easier to work with ;-)
So, if I choose to design for 1024 screens, what width should I go for? 980?
@aj_nscJun 23.2009 — #Get the webdeveloper toolbar add on for firefox and you can resize your window to popular resolutions using the resize option. Then decide for yourself the proper width.
@tracknutJun 23.2009 — #Just to be a bit of a contrarian, I don't believe fluid designs are in any way the ideal solution for web sites. For a site that is largely text, possibly they are, because the user expects text to flow and wrap into empty spaces. But for a site with images, having them bounce around the page, with text going all over the place as a window is resized, seems just wacky to me.
Personally I'd vote for the "ideal" solution to be where there might be a couple pre-built sizes for the images (like we do for thumbnails), which would be used for larger or smaller windows, and the "correct" page would load when the site was entered (not rubber-banding as the user changed the window size). And just like the site should recognize and adjust for mobile browsers by simplifying itself and leaving out large images, it would do the same thing with smaller "regular" browser windows.
@felgallJun 23.2009 — #The printed version needs a fixed width of 748 pixels. For web readers the width is not applicable at all. For all other media people will be using anything between 200 pixels and 200000000 pixels for their browser viewport width and the larger section of that range that your page supports the more likely visitors are to like your site..