Screen Size Question

With what screen resolution in mind, do you design your site? And what about browsers?

I test my sites to Firefox and IE.

About resolution, I use 1024x768.

I don't think that there are lot of people using 800x600 in these days, but also it depends on the site that I make.

For example if I am making the site of an industrial company, I will also support 800x600 as their audience (old) can use this resolution.

For a game site, I won't even check 800x600 as there is no kid using it.

I always keep 800x600 in mind, because quite a few people still use it, like my parents and every school computer at my school. It looks more professional when it's not so crowded anyway, in my opinion. Like a few sites I go to, they have sites designed for 1024x768 resolution, and they look really bad in 800x600 resolution, and even crowded in my own 1024x768 res.

~Crystal

I design my sites to support 800x600. As to browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox are the two that I check my sites with

Oh, there was a question about browsers? I missed that, haha.

Well I used to think that IE, FF, and Opera all looked at codes the same, but I found that out the hard way with my site's latest design. I have friends with FF and Opera, though I only have IE, and so I check with all three.

~Crystal

I tend to go for the smaller size. Too many sites when given a larger palette tend to think they need to fill it all. The sites can then become very cluttered and it is hard to decide where the eye should go. If they stick with a 2 or 3 column layout, the line lengths of text often become too long and hard to read.

As to browsers, while working on my site I have found great differences between IE 5.5 and 6 and FF. IE 6 is similar to FF though as to how it interprets the code. An earlier version of my page worked fairly well for these three but broke on several of the Mac browsers; so I guess I would always test on a Mac too.

I agree.  Just because you have a lot of real estate, does not mean you need to stick something there.  Whitespace is good sometimes.  Gotta take the "less is more" attitude.  :)

Thanks everyone. Interesting opinions there.

With my latest design, I have also observed that IE and FF render the site somewhat differently. So it is definitely worthwhile to test any site in both browsers as well as Netscape and Opera.

Truer words have never been spoken.

1024x768

Unfortunately, my resolution is set to 1200x80, so I sometimes forget to change it before designing. As for browsers: Firefox, IE and Opera. I also use Dreamweaver's validator, and if it finds major netscape errors I'll fix them too.

800x600 is always best. Though you can spread your backgrounds or graphix that can repeat  on the right and left (if a centered web site) so that there is nothing missing from 800x600 users and there are not non graphic areas for bigger res. users...

start designing for 800x600 although recent studies suggest that most users now use 1024x768... check in as many browsers as you can to ensure cross-browser compatibility... try to use CSS when designing, its less painful for updating a design... Now think of your demographic, older users tend to still use 800x600 resolution...

hello urlof,

im designing for 1024x768, but because 8% of the visitors are using 800x600, i designed my site even for non-horizontal-scrolling with a resolution of 800x600.

browsers: i hate sites, which are proud to be "optimized" for watching with a specific browser like firefox... i think this is a kind of idelness and of course the wrong way.

i'm trying to optimize my page for as many browsers as possible ... with easy tables, css and avoiding spaces and borders this may be imaginable.

for excample my page looks alike in many current browsers: firefox, mozilla, internet explorer, opera, safari .... the only browser which cant display my page correctly is netscape, because i'm using backgrondimages for <td>-tags  ;)

so look which resolutions and browsers your visitors are using and customize your page for them!

how about to use the backround image inside a css pseudo class?

by the way it sound like that you are using tables for design... but maybe I'm wrong

Edit: I (try to) write valid (w3.org) HTML code and fix some bugs for IE while using CSS that's enough...for me

Well I always design in 800x600 because thats what i use  >:( so you all need to keep designing in 800x600  :)

how could such a class look like? could you give me an excample, please?

yes

this is off topic, start a new thread at the CSS board

My laptop is set for 1024x768.  But I design sites that fit within 800x600.  I test in IE6 and Firefox during development.  But when I'm done, I also do a quick check in Safari using Safari Test and quick check on IE7 using IECapture

Unless I coding a site for a portfolio or know that someone will scritinize my code, I do not generally run it through the W3C checker.  I know I should, but I'm just too lazy.  My Dreamweaver catches most of the glaring errors anyways.
 

Very interesting links artcoder. Added them to the directory

Thanks for sharing :)

BTW those sites are yours?

No, IECapture and SafariTest are not my sites -- not affiliated with them in any way.  I just happen to know those sites, because I also keep track of interesting links in my own personal directory .