This page shows a representation of what is arguably the most common screen width
and depth in use today [12-Jun-2004]. Namely 800 by 600.
Even though there are
many users with much greater widths available to them - especially corporate users and
developers - if you are in small business
and are targeting home users, you would probably be best to design with 800 by 600 as
the maximum (ar at least the ideal).
The problem with this approach is that, on larger screens, your web
pages can look absurdly small, especially if it is left justified.
There are ways to design around this, without using expensive add-on
products. It's not a bad idea to take a look at the biggest and best (eg. Google and Yahoo Mail)
and imitate them. Both their opening pages are simply center-justifyied with white space on
either side.
The approach we eventually settled on was to design for 800 by 600
but allow the page to grow (to a limit) for larger resolutions.
Most of the pages on the bpresent.net site (this site) will shrink width-ways
down to fit on about 500 pixels and will expand up to about 810. The notable
excpetions are on this tutorial, which expand up to about 1000 with the menu on the
right hand side.
Note that if your font size is set to greater than the default dpi then
it's likely this page is deeper than 600 pixels.
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